I've just found out, via uk.media.radio.archers, of all places, that mobile phones use MIDI for their ringtones. (I'd assumed they had some proprietary format). Some phones use simple MIDI, others can handle polyphonic stuff.
In the UK at least, downloading ringtones is a HUGE business. Typically they go for 1.50 UKP a time. The way it works is that the owner of the rights to the tune (typically a pop song) licences it to the ringtone site for this. I am not sure how the download is managed, presumably a phone call using some TFTP-like protocol with the billing managed by the phone network provider. (I expect Nokia et al have the information easily accessible). Most British tabloid newspapers have a *full page* of adverts for mobile ringtones and screen images in every issue; that means the download services are making enough to spend tens of thousands of pounds a day on advertising. This could be an opportunity to funnel quite a lot of dosh into the ABC user and developer communities, for tunes coded in ABC and then transformed into MIDI. But a site that provided such a service would have to be professional about it: - the rights would have to be absolutely clear. On this one, the owners WILL come down like a ton of bricks on anyone dodging copyright; they already know this is a source of income. (And for any large site, there will be mistakes - these have to be prepared for, the admin WILL get demands from the likes of ASCAP and MCPS, which will sometimes be justified, and must be able to respond, often with a cheque). - the ABC would have to be coded correctly. Mere staff-notation quality won't hack it: mismatch the anacruses between sections or get the tempo wrong and the result will sound unusably silly. Simply funnelling the Tune Finder into such a service would lead to some very angry customers: a user of ABC source can fix or ignore those problems, a mobile phone user can't. - the MIDIfier would have to be correct. That probably means ABCMus is the only option; BarFly can't be made to run in a batch/scripted mode and abc2midi is just plain wrong too much of the time. (ABCMus can do polyphonic stuff, can't it? - even if not yet, chord playing would be a good start). What it would take is a combination of (1) Toby's proposed archive (2) a validation mechanism to weed out unMIDIfiable ABC (3) a conversion interface like that used by concertina.net (4) download/billing links to the mobile phone networks (5) a media law consultant. Can we pull that off? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack> * food intolerance data & recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM "Embro, Embro". To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
