My Heard Space

When you are in the business of selling ring tones there are certain elements that make it difficult to ensure 100% content delivery and with the added pressures to use DRM. The main issue which we will be looking at in this post will be the size issue, There are various ways to try and reduce the size of your ring tone to allow for easy downloading for instance changing the bit-rate , changing the format(encoding) or just shorting the ring tone length. All the methods I just mentioned work but at a compromise to the quality or length of the ring tone. My solution is no different at all to the suggestions above but at least the quality will still be decent for the phone and the length will still be a full track.

Most ring tones in the market are of mp3 quality(true tone) but it is not easy to download a full track mp3 song on the mobile phone yet, The technology is getting better but it is still very much unstable. An alternative to the mp3 download is to use amr encoding which offers good quality at a small file size, It is not cd quality but it is still decent for the mobile phone. You can offer this as alternative download option to your already mp3 or wma ring tone formats.

With amr you can lower the file size e.g. 3 mega bytes full track(mp3) to 500 kilo bytes full track (amr). The only thing you might have to be careful about would be to check if the particular mobile phone does support amr format first before giving it the file because this can cause problems for you with users complaining about downloads not working. If you do not know how to perform checks on the phone – I would suggest you read my other previous post about achieving this feature – detecting mobile devices on your website .

Lets start converting.
Please Note: This post assumes you have Ffmpeg installed and configured on your machine,if you do not know what I mean please read the Ffmpeg section on the site.

/user/bin/ffmpeg -y -i ring.mp3 -ac 1 -ab 12.2k -ar 8000 -f amr -acodec libamr_nb ring.amr

That is all it takes to get the amr conversion working, you might want to play around with these options -ac 1 -ab 12.2k -ar 8000
until you find the right quality and size for you. Please read about the amr options available for use with Ffmpeg and what values can be or cannot be changed.

That’s it folks, I will try to cover the DRM section next time for those who do not know how to use it.