Those were the days

ickplant@lemmy.world to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 880 points –
47

Dude's got a chair handle in his pants.

Contextually I'm saying it's a diaper. This is a guy who doesn't love getting out of his chair.

My first reaction was that he was packing heat like an elephant, but yeah, incontinence guard is far more likely.

Damn… I can remember doing this and just finding it easier to buy a ringtone when they were cheap.

It’s funny how important ringtones were back in the day. I don’t want to hear my phone unless it’s through headphones!

Actually you just had to "play" it and lots of Nokias had a custom ringtone composer you could actually write ringtones with yourself.

So you'd just reserve an hour of computer time from the library, browse some guides on how to compose Axel F on a 3210, write them down/have it printed and then input them into your phone.

Here's that composer in action: https://youtu.be/ymjV1IwReU4

I used to compose ringtone tunes with it still in 2013. everyone else was playing with their smarphone. nokia 3310 was the best, so simple

I don't get it. Don't we do that now as well? Putting .mp3 files up as our ringtones?

(back creaks) In the old days, some phones had a specific audio format for ringtones that wasn't .mp3 to save storage space.

Are we talking about the button phones? Did they have different audio formats cuz their speakers were crappy or something (hence, no use playing high resolution audio)? Did the custom ringtones then sound bad as well?

button phones

Oh god this is the phrase that makes every bone in my body cry out in old.

Sssssshhh, there there, it's ok. They're feature phones

Low quality speakers and storage was far more expensive then than it is now

Old dumb phones could not play arbitrary audio... Well, aside from phone calls of course. Ringtones were a series of... Tones! Kinda like a midi file, ever heard of that?

Extra fun fact, the original iPhone only had THE iphone ringtone, and you could not change it.

Old dumb phones could not play arbitrary audio... Well, aside from phone calls of course. Ringtones were a series of... Tones! Kinda like a midi file, ever heard of that?

Oh, was this because of limited processing power / slow secondary storage read speeds?

Extra fun fact, the original iPhone only had THE iphone ringtone, and you could not change it

NO WAY.... Oof that must've been so annoying, no? Ur phone being a waking advertisement to everyone around you?

Oh, was this because of limited processing power / slow secondary storage read speeds?

All of that and more. They didn't have mass memory, so you had a maximum number of contacts, a maximum number of SMS, a maximum number of ringtones.. but you couldn't delete ringtones to make room for SMSses or such. They were a completely different tech.

NO WAY.... Oof that must've been so annoying, no? Ur phone being a waking advertisement to everyone around you?

They loved it. Also it couldn't share media (messaging apps didn't exist yet and it didn't support MMS) and was GSM only, so to actually do anything smart it had to be connected to WiFi.

Oh, was this because of limited processing power / slow secondary storage read speeds?

That and we hadn't settled on standards nearly to the degree we have now. Much like charging cables it was the wild West for some shit out there. Also, many phones actually did support MIDI, but most normal users didn't know what to do with it lol

Oof that must've been so annoying, no? Ur phone being a waking advertisement to everyone around you?

Back then it was status. "Look at me, I have an IPHOOOOONEEEEE"

I still have some 3gp/3gpp videos recorded on my old slide. What a pain. And I think depending on whether your phone was gsm/CDMA would affect whether it recorded to .3gp or .3g2.

Oh my sweet summer child. Ringtones were in a different audio format than mp3s. Plus, getting the ringtone onto the phone required additional fuckery.

additional fuckery

Oh, wow, that phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting here…

Phones didn't have UFS/USB storage like today. So usually you were using a proprietary cable and software to move files over.

That’s what I’m saying. “Additional fuckery” is really putting it mildly compared to what we all really had to go through.

Oof. May I ask which audio format it was? Or was it different for different phones?

every phone had a different format, i remember the Razr had a deprecated tool to convert .mp3 to a format it could read and limited it to like…30sec audio snippets?

Well first of all who actually has their ringer on anymore

And secondly it was WAY more of a pain in the ass back then

Is there any context to this picture? I’d love to read it lol

how did this guy get into my bedroom, why are the colors backward, and who replaced my desktop with a fax machine?

and who cleaned?

It was a pain in the ass back then.

Had to convert it to a amr file, use a weird proprietary cable.

Btw, is there still "call 01223344 to get that awesome ringtone!" telemarketing nowadays? It still was a few years ago, where i wondered why my mom would voluntarily see telemarketing.

My very first cell phone ever was a Danger Hiptop/Sidekick in 2002. It didn't need conversion. It just straight up used mp3s. 😎

I fought tooth and nail to get my parents to invest in cell phones when they were becoming ubiquitous around the time I started high school. They refused... Until I worked my ass off to buy my own and pay for my own service and they actually saw the benefit of being able to call me when they didn't know where I was. The Sidekick was the only one that had real internet browsing and not that WAP shit. I was also super into MUDS and it had an SSH client built in. Thing was slick. I kinda wish for an updated one that runs Android because I really miss having actual keyboard buttons.

And that spin-flip when you needed to send a long message was just sooo satisfying.

Yeah way easier now am I right? Maybe you should post instructions for the the old people who don't know how

On Android:

Download song as .MP3

Go to the sounds settings

Choose ringtone

Choose "browse files" or whatever similar title your version uses (on pixels it's a + symbol)

Find downloaded MP3 file, select

If you want to edit it down first then use either an app or Audacity on your PC

You can also use a file stored to Google Drive if you wanted to

I should also add this works for notification sounds. If you want custom alerts for different apps, or different contacts, or whatever you can also do that with this system.

My wifes texts are a FFXIV Moogle and her calls are music from the same game, for example

We used to pay for tiny samples to use as a ringtone, now you can just set a song on your drive as a ringtone