What is Ring Tone Text Transfer Language?
All of us are acquainted with mobile phone ringtones. These are features most of us love to customize and update. But do you know the principle behind it? Why ringtones sounds like real audio recording? The answer is simple. It’s not with how the melodies are composed, but the protocol behind playing the melody. Ring Tone Text Transfer Language (RTTTL) is behind those wonderful lullabies and songs you have on your mobile phone.
RTTTL is a common standard developed by Nokia to transfer ringtones from a source to the 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 adopted by other mobile phone manufacturers.
From the web, there are thousands of websites offering free downloadable ringtones. Some of these are already created for a user to download and other melodies are coded in RTTTL for a user to manually compose melodies without downloading the actual tone. The code can be confusing for a beginner, but will surely be comprehensible once used to it. Mobile phone users can also create ringtones of their choice by following the standard.
An RTTTL coded ringtone can be downloaded to a computer and uploaded to a mobile phone. This may require a special software and cable designed for such task. To fully enhance the feature, a user can listen to the melody first before downloading it and once downloaded a user has the option of editing the codes following the RTTTL standard.
So, what does an RTTTL compose of? Like many other standard it is composed of a name, default value, and data. There are also standards applied with RTTTL. The name section identifies the ringtone and can only handle names of not more than ten (10) characters and must not contain a colon ( : ) symbol. This can be the title of a song converted into a mobile phone tone.
The default value on the other hand contains the setting on how the melody will be played. This can be represented by letters d for duration, b for the tempo, and o for octave; each representation is followed by an equal (=) sign and the value. The duration indicates the notation to be used. This can be whole note (1), half note (2), quarter note (4), eighth note (8), sixteenth note (16), and thirty-second note (32).
The octave determines the interval of every pitch coded in RTTTL.
The data part of the RTTTL standard is the notes used by the tone. It can contain a rest or pause, a standard key (a – g), a sharp (#) key, and a minor (b) key. Combining all these elements will produce an RTTTL standard melody.
A portion Harry Potter melody, a film made from a bestseller by Joanne Rowling, can be represented by a Nokia RTTTL format such as: HarryPotter:d=4,o=5,b=125:2-, 8-, 8b, 8.e6, 16g6, 8f#6, 4e6. This contains all the elements necessary to produce a quality audible melody. You can try composing your own tone true RTTTL on your Nokia mobile phone.
