idea: "Dynamic" ringtones

asked 2014-03-23 06:47:50 +0200

irah
141 ●2 ●4 ●5

updated 2014-03-23 18:33:05 +0200

Sometimes it gets annoying to just listen to the same 3-seconds of the ringtone. Especially if your phone rings a lot. Wouldn't it be cool if there would be an option that would enable the ringtone to start at seemingly "random" point of the song every time the phone rings. I don't know if there exists some software on some mobile OS's that would be similar to this. A little googling didn't help, though I might have wrong search terms as I have no clue what this could be called.

I would imagine that this kind of a feature would bring some uniqueness to the phone application. I don't know how easy this is to implement as I haven't found the part that is responsible for playing ringtones yet. But the idea in a nutshell would be that the thing that manages the playing of the ringtones would jump to a "random" point in the ringtone before playing it (if the ringtone is tagged appropriately). Also there should probably be some maximum duration for the skipped part so we wouldn't jump near to the end of the song. After the jump the ringtone would then proceed normally and probably loop if the end is reached.

Of course this would require some preprocessing of the used ringtone to determine good jump points, but this shouldn't be too hard. The jump points could be determined manually by the user in some config file that is for example named similarly to the used song file. Or automatically if the knowledge of the songs BPM is present. Most songs/ringtones have a clear BPM and usually jumping by multiples of the BPM won't sound too bad. Possibly even throw in some quick fade in to smooth out the beginning.

if ringtone is marked as dynamic (ie. some BPM+offset tag in filename or config file present) -> calculate number of samples to skip based on the data + randomness -> jump n-samples forward -> play the ringtone (with possibly a quick fade-in)

I started investigating how and where this should be implemented, but I thought that I would share this idea so if there's someone who is already familiar with the code that handles the incoming calls/ringtones, he/she could implement this much faster. Also I would like to know if this already exists on some platforms.