Ringtone Tools

Ringtone Tools FAQ

What is SMS?
When I refer to SMS on my pages I'm talking about a short message that you can send to your phone from either a web page or another mobile phone. All of my European friends simply call it SMS, while most American mobile phone companies call it "text messaging" or such.

When I send an SCKL code (Nokia binary) to my phone it starts out okay but the middle of the song it gets scrambled.
This is probably happens because whatever you are using to send the SMS is adding characters to the SCKL code. Infact someone sent me an email saying their phone provider added a dash to every SMS message sent so sending ringtones to the phone using this method would not work. To get around this you can try emailing the SCKL message (see the docs for more info) or you can download a program like GNOKII and use either your phone or someone else's phone to SMS the SCKL messages directly to your phone.

One more thing I can recommend is to make sure your SCKL messages aren't getting "line breaks" in it. Sometimes cutting and pasting the SCKL codes into HTML textareas, linebreaks can get added when the code doesn't fit in one line. Also make sure that your SCKL message isn't too long. Ringtone Tools defaults to creating SCKL messages that are 140 chars in length, however, this is not the default length for all providers. You can change the message length with the -s option.

When I sent an SCKL code (Nokia binary) to my phone, the phone says "Ringtone Received" but when it plays it there is no sound.
It's hard to say why this happens but maybe I can give hints. First of all, each SCKL message has two parts. The first part tells the phone that the SMS message coming in is a "Smart Message" and is a ringtone and the second part is the actual ringtone binary code. So if you send only "//SCKL1581" to your phone as an SMS, your phone will say Ringtone Received but the ringtone will be silent when you try and play it.

So here is the trick then, between the //SCKL part and the actual ringtone there needs to be some kind of break. I use a space and it appears to work on all the SMS web pages I've used, however I've seen some specs that say to use a linefeed char. The reason I use a space is because when I was first looking into //SCKL, the examples I found used a space, and it's worked every time I tried it.

Another thing you might consider is maybe between the //SCKL part and the actual ringtone, there is a stray character being added somewhere that is destroying the binary code.

Can Ringtone Tools .ico output support multiple images in one .ico file?

There is no support in Ringtone Tools for multiple images when creating .ico's. However, I wrote a bmp2ico program that you can download from http://www.mikekohn.net/ that does this.

How come my tempo got changed from 197 to 200 when converting to SCKL?

The SCKL format only supports 32 preset tempos. This is a limit in the SCKL format itself. The legal tempos in the SCKL format are the following: { 25,28,31,35,40,45,50,56,63,70,80,90,100, 112,125,140,160,180,200,225,250,285,320, 355,400,450,500,565,635,715,800,900 }. If the file you're trying to convert to SCKL doesn't use one of these tempos, then Ringtone Tools will adjust it to the closest tempo.

In the RTTTL and RTX formats, why are notes that should be written as b written as h?

In the USA the C Ionian scale written as: C,D,E,F,G,A,B,C. In Europe (at least in Estonia (aka Kidneystonia) where the ultra-wise Indrek is from) the C Ionian scale is written as: C,D,E,F,G,A,H,C. I guess whoever made up the RTTTL spec comes from a country that uses H instead of B. Either way, Ringtone Tools will accept RTTTL files that use B instead of H, but when writing RTTTL files, to ensure compatibility with correctly implemented RTTTL reading programs, H is used when creating RTTTL files.