A ringtone or ring tone is the sound made during incoming call to a cell phone. A lot of the sounds are customizable sounds. There are three types of ringtones we know of right now: Monophonic ringtones can play only one type of musical tone at a time. Polyphonic ringtones can play several types of tones at a time (up to 72 in recent phones). The first polyphonic ringtones used sequenced recording methods such as MIDI. Such recordings specify what instrument should play a note at a given time, but the actual instrument sound is dependent upon the playback device. And the third one is truetone, which is also known as “realtone”, “mastertone”, or “superphonic ringtone.” Truetone has been encoded with a high fidelity format such MP3, AAC, or WMA format, and represents the latest evolution of the ringtone. Truetones, which are often excerpts from songs, have become popular as ringtones.

Most of the popular ringtones that people search for are hip hop ringtones. But because cell phone are being used in more and more place, people also look to download dance ringtones. Ringtones come in lot of different formats such as eMelody. iMelody, KWS, MID / MIDI, Morse code, MOT, MP3, Nokia / SCKL / OTT, PDB, QCP, RTX, Samsung1 & Samsung2, Siemens Keypress, Siemens SEO, SMAF and AAC.

Ringtone files can be sent to your mobile cell phone using direct connection devices like USB cable, Bluetooth, text messaging, e-mail, and right from the Internet. But cell phone users should be beware of downloading free ringtones from the internet, because the cell phone company will charge fees for the time used during dowload.