Apple Adds iPhone .99 Ringtone to iTunes ... Kinda Lame ...

So this iPhone thing can hold GIGS of music, all available at a flick of a finger, and ringtones still cost .99 EXTRA. If I purchase a song on iTunes, I have to spend twice as much to use a crappy version of the same song as a ringtone.

Why can't this phone use the same audio file?

Why do you need to take up more storage?

Why does it cost extra? It's the same song!

Would I get charged extra if I bought a song and played it really loud on crappy speakers? That's what a ringtone IS!

I'm really frustrated with Windows Mobile right now, but at least I can use WHATever media I want, HOWever I want...

Here's Engadget's write up!

And Here's Gizmodo's!

Considering Sound Design...

We live in a world infested with noise pollution. We live in a world of bad neighbors, loud cars, crappy leaky headphones, gadgets, airplanes, hustle and bustle.

Rob Scovell over at VOIP and Other Stuff... takes a brief second to examine the situation with our gadgets and the noises they make. I for one agree, that little to no thought really seems to go into why devices make the noises they do. Watch a meeting grind to a halt as Hawaii 5-O starts blasting out of some guy's crotch and you'll know what I mean.

"I'll never forget one meeting I had once at Waikato University. We were sitting around discussing something or other and there was a beep. It came from the table of the chap whose job it was to do innovative things with PDAs and other small devices. When it beeped, he jumped, started looking frantically at the collection of gadgets in front of him, and said, "Whoooaaaaa! What was that?! What am I meant to be doing?". Was it a phone call? A text message? An appointment reminder? Or was a device announcing that its battery was going flat?

That was the first time I thought about sound design. Not design that is sound, in the sense of a bridge being sound, but design of appropriate sounds for appropriate situations. I thought about it briefly, but it never really went to the front of my mind."

When I got my 6700, I IMMEDIATELY turned off all of the stock sounds and put in my own. Song samples that don't sound like songs (the beginning of Baba O'Reilly is an excellent ringtone), simple subtle sound effects (like a TARDIS whoosh), all of these really serve to shape how I used my phone, and helped to deliver information quickly. Ringtones are invaluable in that I know who is there before I even look at the screen.

So read the rest of his article, and at the end he links out to another great read by Max Lord, on the tailoring of sound effects for devices and situations.
someaudioguy some audio guy voice over vo voiceover sound effects design floey adr dubbing production


I wish my crotch played the theme to Hawaii 5-O...

You KNOW you're a Geek When... SmartPhone Edition!

I promise this will be loosely related to audio in some small way...

So you know you're a geek when you look at the back of your phone and think "I could do better".

If you haven't figured it out by now I'm a gadget fanatic, and my current weapon of choice is the PPC-6700 smartphone from Sprint. I've been a Windows Mobile fan since the iPaq 3650 (or I could just say "for a while now" I guess), and when it comes to versatility there's nothing better out there right now (in the USA of course, but that's another post).

Full QWERTY keyboard, slider touch screen, highspeed data, this phone gets a lot of things right for a data device. The one thing this phone fails at is ... well ... being a phone. One of the main problems with it is the main speaker on the back isn't very loud. I've tried boosting the volume of the ringtones and alerts, but if the phone is in my back pocket I still might miss a call or email. This also means that the speakerphone setting on this phone is near useless, and the only way I could talk on the phone was with an ear piece.

The problem though isn't that the speaker is under powered, it's that the speaker is covered ... by plastic ... and a vanity mirror ... to take pictures of yourself ... and I'm kinda funky looking ... so I tend not to do that ... very much ... [ahem]


But no longer!



An electric drill, some super fine sandpaper, the mesh from some busted headphones, and about 2 hours of labor (hey I went slow, I love this phone), and voilà, Better phone! Extreme Makeover style! ... OK not quite but still, I am an AUDIO engineer...


Here's the before:


And here's the after:



I know it IS sexy!
cellphones, sound, audio, some audio guy, speakers, mod, ppc-6700, ringtones, volums