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Palm Tips: How to add ringtones to your Treo -- for free!
Tue, 07 Feb 2006

Ringtones are a huge and weird market with people willing to pay more for a 20 second craptacular rendition of a song than for the raw or mp3 version of it. With such a huge market and millions of dollars being made you can believe the telcos like to make it hard to install a ringtone without first heading to their ever-so-convenient online store. Fortunately Palm has so far not been the sort of company to throttle the function of a device in order to give them another market.. so for us, installing new ringtones is easy.

Easy as Sunday morning. Heres how...

Palm OS ringtones (on the very fine Treo devices at least) are stored in the same kind of database most other files are, and very much like the alarm system tones are. In fact, the ringtones within those databases are really just standard MIDI files -- type one MIDI if memory serves - the same sorts of files that musicians have been working with for decades. Oh I hear you say.. but.. wait for it.. hold the thought ;)

The hard part with any handset is getting the ringtone to your phone in some form or another. With the Motorola+Apple iTunes ROKR phone you'd think you could just select an mp3 and use that for an alarm.. but not so fast, Motorola wants to gouge you first. Thanks to Palm, we needn't worry.. we can pretty much use any normal Palm method we like.

Find an appropriate MIDI file to use as a ringtone

First you need a music file to use for a ringtone; to be even in the right ballpark make sure its short and loud and sweet so your neighbours won't kill you. Make sure it is less than 64k in length since that is a Palm OS record-size requirement for now on most units (Zodiac exempted.) Many songs will be enormous (250k or more!) and are ruled straight out, but many thousands will easily squeek in at 20-60k so you should have no problem. Google and other search engines are your friend.

For example, if you're a nerd like me, you'll head right on over to the Videogame Music Archive where you'll find fan-done remakes of popular games. I just browsed through to the Arcade section and pick up a remake of song Pacman music. Go ahead, you know you want it, and it nicely fits in right under the 64k limit. For all you yungins' go pick up the Super Mario Brothers theme song.

Remember that your desktop PC can play .mid files as well, so when looking for music you can easily browse around with your desktop's web browser to find a piece of music you like.

Move the file to your handheld

With conventional handsets this can be difficult since they want you to use a store to buy the ringtone; sometimes you can work around it, but with Palm OS there generally aren't any worries.. though some carriers do like to neuter the OS and goad you into using their GPRS or EDGE data services..

Options are many, but the more obvious ones are infra-red, email, web, or SD card reader.

I've never done the email technique myself, preferring not to consume vitaly expensive GPRS data. In the past I've done infra-red, meaning that you hold your phone handset near your laptop, await Windows to *bing*, and then use the infra-red program to send over the song.mid (whatever.mid) to your handset. Not too hard, but let me focus on the easier methods more..

The easiest methods in my experience are to use the Palm OS web browser built right into the Treo ROM. There are two main approaches..

By this point you should have integrated your new MIDI file into the system ringtone database. Simply head on over to the built-in prefs application and into the Tones section. Picking a new ringtone and you'll see your file listed -- voila, now you too can have the Pacman theme song annoying everyone around you!

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