Free Ringtones

Ringtones are fun; ringtones are cool; ringtones are expensive.

Well, two out of three are true. Ringtones have traditionally been a pain to obtain, they are expensive and there are a ton of sites that rope you in with promises of free tones and you end up on something harder to get out of than a book-of-the-month club.

Now there is a new site that the New York Times Web site accurately calls the youtube of Web sites. Free tones, free wallpapers, free videos. The site encourages you to upload content that you create yourself. One feature that may prove to be a problem down the road is 20 second mp3 clips of copyrighted music. A quick search shows songs by Timbaland, the weird Numa-Numa song, Chamillionaire, even mother of the year Britney Spears.

Backed by John Ferber a multimillionaire who hit the jackpot when he sold advertising.com to Time Warner AOL for $72 million, this site stands a chance of being around for a while.

So if you aren’t ready to check it out yet here are a couple more features. Why download somebody else belting out the hits when you can do it yourself? You can create clips by calling in on your own phone and recording one. Another option allows you to use a text to speech editor. I have to admit the last one isn’t a big seller for me.

I signed up for the site and picked a song to download. They gave me the address to my download area and after a few minutes of clicking around I made it to the download area and downloaded the new ringtone. There are the usual warnings that you should check your plan and understand the standard text messaging and data rates apply. In this new world of powerful data driven cell phones you really want to have a plan that lets you use some data.