how many freakin' ringtone formats do you really need!?

since ringtones seemed to be following the same sort of evolution as PC multimedia audio, you'd think that companies producing cell phone hardware and operating systems would have studied the history of computer audio development so they could make informed design decisions on how to build a better product, and how to make a bigger buck. at the very least, ya figure they wouldn't wanna make the same mistakes twice, right? in particular, you'd think they'd wanna avoid the pain and horror (oh, the horror!) of "format wars" ...

really, people, have we learned nothing from the past 20 years of technological development!? isn't it clear yet that if every device can talk to every other device, and all platforms can share data, then everybody makes more money? isn't that practically the definition of the internet? isn't that why MIDI (a protocol that allows any musical instrument to talk to any other musical instrument) is still, after more than 30 years, an essential piece of every recording studio on the planet? hasn't the ubiquitous deployment of open, standard, non-proprietary file formats allowed more companies to develop more cool software, sell more hardware, and produce big honkin' cashflows!?

look, i'm just the piano player, and even I understand the concept. SO can someone puh-lease explain to me why Why WHY there are so many closed, proprietary, non-standardized ringtone formats floating around these days? sure, ringtone producers are creating WAV files, but if they want to sell to a world market, they also have to produce SMAF, and CMX, and iMelody, and SP-MIDI, and MP3 at various resolutions, and AAC, and AMR, and and and ... holy crap, batman! how many acronyms do you really need!?

OK, i understand that each of these formats were developed to address some specific low-powered hardware situation ... but didn't the designers understand that any resource-constrained, low-bandwidth environment was guaranteed to be temporary, particularly in the unbelievably fast-paced cell phone industry? (sigh) i can almost hear in my mind's ear some engineer saying "but we can do more cool stuff if we have complete control over the data" and some marketing guy saying "we can force users to buy only our products" and some lawyer saying "we'll encrypt it so nobody can steal it" and a thousand other reasons why creating a new format that only your company can make, license and profit from seems like a good business plan.

BUT IT'S NOT. it stifles tool development, it confuses and angers consumers, it creates market chaos, it makes production and distribution more difficult and time-consuming and expensive ... in short, proprietary formats are simply a gigantic pain in the ass that take time, energy and creativity away from products that actually will delight customers and give them a reason to shell out large amounts of cold hard cash!

and particularly in the case of ringtones, we're not trying to do anything really tricky here! there's no fancy 3D graphics or streaming buffers, we're simply playing a clip of downloaded music when the phone rings - and nothing else! when a call comes in, that's it, baby -- everything stops and your device can be (almost) exclusively dedicated to making noise ... geez, louise, how freakin' hard is THAT to do!?

yes, yes, i know what you're gonna say: until recently, cell phones CPUs weren't powerful enough to play digital samples, or were equipped only with beeping piezo ringers and under-powered speakers, and so all these lo-rez formats were the best you could do ... but you could also argue that at the most basic level, a cell phone is simply a device that converts digital data into analog sound waves (you don't think your voice goes over the radio network analog, do you?) and any phone that can't play a digital sample is simply a bad phone. plus these days, when phones are a fashion accessory, and using last year's model is like wearing bell-bottoms and tie-dye, if your phone isn't powerful enough to play an MP3 ringtone ... geez, man, get another phone!

but the real, most important, reason why all you really need is decent WAV or MP3 playback for ringtones is: THE CONSUMER DOESN'T CARE!!! joe user has no interest in whether this ringtone will play on that phone, or what resolution is supported, or who owns the license ... in fact most of the time, joe user can't even tell the difference between the sound of one format versus the other (hell, *I* can barely tell the difference sometimes, given the size and quality of cell phone speakers, and i listen to these things for a living!) => here's what joe user cares about: "oh cool! the new beyonce ringtone! whaddya mean, it doesn't work on my phone!?"

i could rant on this topic for quite some time, but i'll wrap up by saying that the ringtone format wars have cost a lot of companies a lot of money, and caused a lot of consumers a lot of grief, but the first battle is already over, and digital audio is the hands-down winner. in a world where cell phones are more powerful than the desktop computers that ran those After Dark Screen Savers, monophonic and MIDI ringtones are dead soldiers, proprietary wrapper and compound formats are a dying breed, and MP3 vs AAC seems like a pointless argument over which sucks less on tiny speakers.

but there's a new battleground taking shape ... and it's video. in the next few years, you're going to see video ringtones emerge as the "cool new thing" and so i have a one thing to say to any engineers, programmers, system designers, cell phone carriers, marketing personnel, content providers, or lawyers, reading this column:

MPEG movies are JUST FINE for this purpose!!! there's no need for new, closed, non-standardized, proprietary, video ringtone formats!!!

of course, there's also Quicktime MOV and Windows WMV and AVI and Flash and and and ... and really, i'm not kidding here, if you're even THINKING about creating a new video ringtone format ... stop right where you are, put the thing down, and just walk away -- because if i hear about one more useless, pointless, short-sighted, non-scalable, hardware-dependent, platform-specific, monopoly-attempting, "ya can't make it 'cept with my special tool" ringtone format ... well, i don't know exactly what i'm gonna do, but i guarantee, it won't be pretty!!!

      - pdx

p.s. the answer to the question posed in the title of this blog: one for audio, one for video, end of story!

cheers, jeers, and audio topics that annoy you can be sent to the annoying audio guy ...