My ringtone was a funky chiptune version of O Green World by Gorillaz.
I was the guy that used audacity to make ringtones and then share them with as many people as possible. This was of course once phones could play actual music as ringtones.
I used to record the song using my cell phones microphone to ensure it was as low quality a possible.
Blast from the past moment. Took me 4 episodes of yugioh to be able to properly record the intro song so I could listen to it whenever I wanted. Took me 3 for Pokémon.
I used my brother’s vinyl lp of the rocky horror show (Australian cast) to record toucha toucha touch me for my ring tone, and my voicemail message was sweet transvestite(just the “how’d you do” bit).
My God I feel old right now
They could. As long as they were midi files.
I used to be able to play a song or yt video and use an aux cable to go from the pc’s headphone out, right back into the pc’s mic in, which audacity recognized as a mic, so you could easily record anything playing in original quality.
These days I don’t even want a ringtone on my phone.
Back in that day, before everything had an app, most notifications were important
And before 99% of the calls and texts you receive were spam, political campaigns inevitably addressing you by the wrong name with heartfelt pleas for money, IRS scams, “Bob” from Microsoft technical support, Your Car’s Extended Warranty, AI generated robocalls telling you not to vote, or someone’s hysterical babymomma who refuses to understand that whoever she’s looking for might have had this number in 2007, but they don’t have it anymore.
For a while I kept getting calls from this old lady who didn’t realize she had to dial an area code before calling her son. After the first couple I answered it and explained to her that she’s dialing the wrong area code, but she didn’t remember and kept calling me and I’d let it go to voicemail. They were pretty sad and I think she was just lonely and wondering why her son wasn’t answering.
Eventually she stopped so I hope she figured it out.
You just unlocked a memory for me, and this happened from about 2008-2010 (not cell related, but it is phone related).
One day we got home and there was a message on the machine from someone asking us to remember to bring something when we visited him. Unfortunately, we had no idea who it was, so we just wrote it off as a wrong number. It happened a few more times after that, and we were getting curious.
I’d moved into the house in 2006 and received that phone number at that time. We often got calls from bill collectors looking for the previous residents, so we generally let everything go to the machine.
One evening we got a call, and I think I recognized that the number was this person’s, so I answered it. I told him he had the wrong number, and he said he’d had that same number for years and read back my number, the one he’d just called. I was like, “Uh, I don’t know what to tell you, but I’ve had this number since 2006.” He tried a few more times, and it was sometimes late in the evening.
At some point I looked up the number he was calling from and found it was a nursing home, and the pieces started to fall into place. My wife and I talked about it a few times, and we decided that if our relative was doing that, we’d want to know. We weren’t upset, but it felt like information the family should have. Who knows who else he might be calling, or getting calls from. So, we decided that when he called again, we’d call the nursing home and let them know it was happening.
But, we never got the chance. He never called again.
I still have my phone set that way. I turn off all notifications that aren’t messages. Though, I guess now it all goes through my watch first.
i only unmute when i’m expecting an important call (like the pizza man at my door)
Our pizza man doesn’t call or ring the doorbell. He sends a text and if you’re not down there in like 15 seconds he is GONE
This just seems like more work for him!
I can get away from unmuting thanks to my Mi Band 😬
How much you spending on custom vibration patterns?
I would throw a dollar at shave and a haircut for texts.
Do you have an iPhone? You can make your own!
Settings > sound & haptics > [pick any tone] > haptics (at the top) > create new vibration
Mine’s always on silent mode too.
Ay but there are still notification chimes
Man, OPs caption unlocked a core memory I have of calling my high school boyfriend at 858 pm, and talking on the phone with him for about 2.5 hours before he got notified that he was under 10 mins left for the month.
We had thought he was only going to lose 2 of his minutes 😭.
I remember when they finally came out with the free unlimited minute plans.
Mind=blown
Yeah but at first it was only Cingular to Cingular or Verizon to Verizon “free unlimited”
How about Alltel’s “Fave 5”?
I stayed with Sprint through years of them being the shittiest in my area because I was grandfathered into an old plan with free nights starting at 5pm. Just taking non-stop at 6pm like a baller.
Oh yeah those were the days!
Now you’ve gotta pay me a hecking salary for me to use the damn TELEPHONE function. Ew
She has a baby by macaulay culkin now.
Who is she?
Brenda Song.
Brenda Song.
I just looked at her filmography. I was just a little too old to know her shows. My younger brother watched some of them. It I was nearing the end of high school at that time.
Culkin is one lucky son of a bitch
36 y/o now. What was she, 12 in this photo?
Alina Li obviously.
London Tipton
I had the hots for her back in the day.
Didn’t know they had kids though, good for them!
2 of em
Oh shit, a lil family pack.
Baby by Macaulay Culkin sounds like a perfume brand.
Oh. Is that who that is? I thought it was just some random token Asian girl.
Rich girl in sweet life of Zack and Cody
If you weren’t a kid in that age, it was a very popular Disney tv show
I was probably in my '30s by then. The only time I heard of this girl was Macaulay Culkin interview, that’s when I first learned about Brenda song.
I’m just hitting early 30s now, I grew up watching Brenda song on Disney channel. Experiencing the passing of time is crazy as fuck.
i bought akon - lonely from a TV ad when i was a young teenager for my polyphonic nokia.
what i didnt realise was it signed me up to a weekly £5 subscription and it racked up over £100 before my dad found out.
Had to abandon that number and get a new sim
Yeah I remember those subscription scams. Real scummy stuff
The massive block of fine print at the bottom of the screen. Things my preteen self would not take notice of.
I think their only recourse was that there was the asterisk with the subscription verbage in really tiny fine print that was only visible if you had an 80" projector TV
i was well below the age at which i could enter into a legally binding contract so there was also that. but we didnt fight it, we just threw the sim away and forgot about it
Lol I feel ya. My brother did something similar with an SMS catfact-esque subscription in the days where sms wasn’t free, our mom was about ready to kill him. Problem was that it billed to the carrier, and so it was like $10/month on top of per message fees, and the carrier didn’t bill it until like 6 months later
Never bought a ring tone. I just stuck with the default Canon in D.
not to brag but tabbed out Tool’s Forty Six & 2 as my programmable ring tone myself
A story the descendants will need to have strong search skills to understand.
One day, Merv Griffin was going through his snail mail and found a hefty check to him from a company he’d never heard of.
He used the intercom to summon his assistant. They explained to him that his people had licensed the ’ Final Jeopardy’ music to be a ring tone.
Then they had to explain to Merv what a ring tone was.
I want to believe this but I don’t want to search for it.
You can believe me. No body ever lies on the interwebs.
Merv Griffin? The elevator killer?
Let’s not forget, you could also compose your own ringtones on those 😁. Well, that’s what I did 😂.
A friend of mine had self-composed Darude - Sandstorm as his ringtone. Amazing shit
You still can if you want to. My phone uses an MP3 for ringtone that I selected. It’s music that I wrote and recorded in my home studio even
Meeh, it’s just not the same 😂. I miss the quirky score notation on those ancient things 😂.
I used to buy the songs that would play as my phone ringing. Like I’m not sure how to say it but when you called me you were forced to listen to a shitty song I liked instead of hearing the riiing riiing. Or when I called my weed guy instead of hearing the riiing or was 36 Mafia "where is the bud, where is the bud playing.
A friend of mine still has fucking Mozart playing when you call him.
Can you do this on iPhone? For people who aren’t in your contacts?
He has iPhone. Idk how he still has that Mozart ringer (when you call him you hear Mozart). I didn’t know him back when that was popular
I believe they were called ringback tones. Those were neat.
The good ol days of asking Jeeves to find you tabs/sheet music.
Exactly! 😂
Or you just lay in bed at night and just try to properly edit the score notation to a song you really like, but it’s kinda niche, still all your friends know it, and then brag about it when you meet up “yo, check out my ringtone 😏” 😂.
Don’t forget ringback tones so u could force anyone who called to listen to a scratchy version of a shitty song any time they called. My sister still had hers til like 2015 or something.
If someone texted me, the reply was “these cost me $0.25, so i’ll talk to you on AIM when I get home”
Ahh yes… the Xennial Generation.
After being pointed out that I basically nailed the window for just millennials, I realize this comment is really fucking stupid. So if you wanna waste your time…
I think that’s a good name for kids born between 1980 and 1995. We mostly grew up with NO Internet at all but were pretty immersed in it by the end of high school. I’m young enough to have had both floppy disks and flash drives in my youth. Once my classmates and I got flash drives, that’s how we shared music between each other after we got Chris to download what we wanted from Limewire lol
I mean that pretty much covers the entire millennial generation…
Dude, where the fuck did our 20s and 30s go?
Shhh… OP wants to think he was uniquely born into his own personal time period
Xennial refers to people born from somewhere in the mid 70s to 1980. It’s a narrow subset of Gen X made up of those that were growing up during the information revolution.
I would say it might apply to someone in the very early 80s. But anyone born in 1995 definitely had their formative years with internet access and are firmly millennials.
To me, the earliest Millennials were the class of 2000. It always felt like there was extra pressure on us because we were going to be the first of a new millennium.
The divide was especially stark in my high school. The class of 99 - the last of Gen X - were kicked out of every pep rally and assembly for being disruptive, while the other classes were all well behaved and didn’t really understand why they were acting this way.
Wait I’ve never heard this divide before. I’m one of the last years of gen x, and we were definitely disruptive and anti establishment for school shit like assemblies. I figured all high school kids hated authority and rules. Did millenials not have this attitude? Why?
I had to drive over to a different truck shop for a flash drive this year.
On my car I use a flash drive to crack the software.
In my shops library they have a few floppies.
:')
Excuse me, I downloaded my ringtones, and had the funky cables to upload ringtones to my Nokias thank you very much!
Hell yeah brother.
My Motorola SLVR would blast “oh my god that’s the funky shit” from the Prodigy - Funky Shit sample of the beastie boys.
My ringtone has been the same one for the last 15 years, Cowbell Rock. I paid for it twice, once when Ringtone Feeder was a thing, and then again from iTunes. Worth it. Best ringtone ever. Would buy again if I could.
I just go with a telephone ringing. I always have. Why not have my phone make the same sound phones made for over a century? Nothing wrong with it as-is.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I remember in the era of 3310, there would be a spreadsheet for you to compose those pop song tune in a teen magazine. Simpler time.
I remember finding a website with fairly rough versions of popular melodies were transcribed for Nokia ringtone format. Pretty sure I went for some Metallica. Not sure if it was before or after we got ISDN, but I’m fairly sure I already had a hotmail address.
I’m sorry but paying for a rington was never cool. And it’s not a generational thing, just gullibility
Just wait till you find out people also used to pay for backgrounds and emoji. Lol. Scams and viruses, the lot of them.
Don’t forget ringback tones.
I used to pay for those sweet flaming mouse cursor gifs too. Except I didn’t, my parent’s unexpectedly did lol
When I was young I would edit my own mp3 to make ringtones and figure out how to transfer them to my phone.
Now I’m old and I work and I don’t have time, so I’d rather just pay for it.
Of course I don’t even do that because I don’t give a shit and just keep the default one.
Anyone remember paying ten cents or honestly usually more per text until someone did out the numbers and we all realized we were paying more to text than NASA pays to beam data back from the goddamn Hubble? Like 5x as much on average? And only then did unlimited texting become common?
Best part was that SMS was specifically designed to use the current infrastructure at the time without inducing any real demand on it. It didn’t cost the companies much of anything to implement it.
