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What is Ring Tone Text Transfer Language?

We are all familiar with mobile phone ringtones. These are features that most of us love to customize and update. But do you know the principle behind it? Why do ringtones sound like a real audio recording? The answer is simple. It’s not about how the melodies are composed, but about the protocol behind the melody’s performance. Ring Tone Text Transfer Language (RTTTL) is behind those wonderful lullabies and songs that you have on your mobile phone.

RTTTL is a common standard developed by Nokia to transfer ringtones from source to destination. It can be from a computer to a mobile phone or from a mobile phone to another mobile phone through Short Messaging Systems (SMS). This is very popular with many Nokia phone models and is slowly being adopted by other mobile phone manufacturers.

From the web, there are thousands of websites that offer free downloadable ringtones. Some of these are already created for a user to download and other melodies are RTTTL encoded for the user to compose melodies manually without downloading the actual tone. The code can be confusing for a beginner, but it will surely be understandable once you get used to it. Mobile phone users can also create ringtones of their choice following the standard.

An RTTTL encoded ringtone can be downloaded to a computer and uploaded to a mobile phone. This may require special software and cable designed for the task. To fully enhance the function, a user can listen to the melody first before downloading it and once downloaded, the user has the option to edit the codes following the RTTTL standard.

So what is an RTTTL made of? Like many other standards, it is made up of a name, a default value, and data. There are also standards applied with RTTTL. The name section identifies the ringtone and can only handle names of no more than ten (10) characters and must not contain a colon (:). This can be the title of a song turned into a mobile phone ringtone.

On the other hand, the default contains the settings for how the melody will be played. This can be represented by the letters d for the duration, b for the tempo and or for the octave; each representation is followed by an equal sign (=) and the value. The duration indicates the notation to be used. It can be a whole note (1), a middle note (2), a quarter note (4), an eighth note (8), a sixteenth note (16) and a thirty second note (32).

The octave determines the interval of each tone encoded in RTTTL.

The data part of the RTTTL standard is the notes used by the pitch. It can contain a rest or pause, a standard key (a – g), a sharp key (#), and a minor key (b). Combining all of these elements will produce a standard RTTTL melody.

A portion of the melody from Harry Potter, a movie made from a Joanne Rowling bestseller, can be rendered in a Nokia RTTTL format as: HarryPotter: d = 4, o = 5, b = 125: 2-, 8- , 8b, 8 .e6, 16g6, 8f # 6, 4e6. It contains all the elements necessary to produce a quality audible melody. You can try composing your own true RTTTL ringtone on your Nokia mobile phone.

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