We"ve seen Microsoft show off Mango in the past, and we knew that custom ringtones were coming to the platform in some form, but we haven"t seen how they"ll work fully, until today. In a post on the Windows Team Blog, Alice Luu, program manager for the sound experience on Windows Phone detailed how the new support will work. Alice says in the post that their primary goal with custom ringtones was "unleashing the creative energy of app developers" and she says that she expects to see a "burst of ringtone-related apps in the Marketplace." She goes on to say that the company is planning on leaving it up to developers to decide where they go with it.
With Mango, selecting a custom ringtone is easy. As long as the sound file you wish to select meets the following criteria, it can be set as a custom ringtone:
- 39 seconds or shorter
- smaller than 1 megabyte (MB)
- saved in MP3 or WMA format
- not copy-protected (i.e. DRM free)
Alice details the process of adding a ringtone, saying that they can be added through Zune by adding a sound or music file, then changing the "Genre" field on the song to "Ringtone" and synchronizing it like any other music track. Because it has the "ringtone" genre set, it won"t show up in your phones music library, but will automatically be shown under the new "custom ringtones" category in the ringtone selector.
On top of all this, Alice says that in Mango the team added 9 new ringtones, inspired by "various traditions in the new Asian markets [they will] be supporting this fall."
Mango is expected to be released in September this year, and brings 500 new features to the Windows Phone 7 platform, including Multitasking, IE9, OS-wide IM integration, deeper social networking and more.