What is POLYPHONIC RINGTONE?

With the rapid development of cell phones, there appeared a few types of music formats, which can be played on such cell phones. A polyphonic ringtone is a successor of monophonic ringtone. The difference between both kinds of ringtones is in the following: monophonic ringtones can play only one tone at a time. That is why the sounding of the melody is pretty primitive and sounds very abruptly (such melodies are usually played by cheap and old cell phone models).

Polyphonic ringtones can play more than one tone at a time and to produce more complex sounds. While playing such polyphonic ringtones, you polyphonic-capable cell phone imitates some musical instruments' sounds. When those sounds are combined, they sound like a real melody, produced by a real instrument, e.g. piano. Besides, not all the instruments are polyphonic. If a cell phone can play, let's say, 40 notes at a time, so it is said, that this cell phone have 40-voice polyphony (or 40-tone polyphony). Some modern phones e.g. Sony Ericsson K800i and many others can play up to 72 tones, which makes a very good impression on the person, who likes qualitative polyphonic ringtone music. Of course, polyphonic ringtones are not so perfect and lack the ability of playing voice of singers (I mean lyrics).

You, probably, think, that playing more than 10 notes at a time is not possible, but it is not true. Even playing on some musical instruments you can press more than 10 keys even having only 10 fingers. Besides, some notes, especially on computer or synthesizers, may be played a few times or have a prolonged sounding (usually free polyphonic ringtones are created with the help of special computer programs, which convert .mp3 into polyphonic ringtones). While combining more notes at a time, you phone can produce more complex and various sounds of different qualities, depending on the polyphonic ringtone.

There are two more important questions: is it easy and possible to download and play polyphonic ringtones on my cell phone? And what cell phones support polyphonic ringtones? I have to say, that nowadays there exist different kinds of free polyphonic ringtones: Motorola polyphonic ringtones, Samsung polyphonic ringtones, polyphonic ringtone for Sony Ericsson, Nokia polyphonic ringtone and others, that is almost every cell phone can play this kind of ringtones. Besides, even most cell phone carriers offer a lot of mobile phone polyphonic ringtone downloads. You can find free polyphonic Sprint ringtones, free Verizon polyphonic ringtones, free Nextel polyphonic ringtone and many others.

There are a lot of free polyphonic ringtone sites, where you can download best free polyphonic ringtones for almost all possible cell phone models. They offer a few categories of free polyphonic ringtones, which can even be subdivided into subcategories depending on the style of music you like, your cell phone model etc. Some sites offer not free, but, anyhow, cheap polyphonic ringtones.

The process of free polyphonic ringtone downloading is also very simple. If you want to download a certain free polyphonic ringtone directly into you cell phone, you need GPRS or WAP. Usually you have to compose an SMS, which will contain the polyphonic ringtone code and send it to a certain number. Then you'll receive a message with a few options telling you what actions you can do with your free polyphonic ringtone (usually "download", "save" and "delete"). Besides, you can send your polyphonic ringtones to other people, but for this purpose you have to compose an SMS and give the number of the recipient of the polyphonic ringtone and the code of the free polyphonic ringtone you want to send. Details concerning sending free polyphonic ringtones (as well as polyphonic ringtones requiring payment) to other people you can find very easy on the Internet. Usually, the sites of mobile operators give such information to its costumers.

In spite of one disadvantage, that polyphonic ringtones can't play lyrics of your favorite songs, I think that this is not a problem. The quality of the sounding of the polyphonic ringtones is very high, and for me this is the only important thing.