The tug o’ war with iPhone ringtones
The iPhone is a wonderful phone. I love it. However, today I upgraded my firmware to 1.1.1 and Apple tricked my phone so that if I open up a ringtone menu, it loses my custom ringtone setting. The ringtone’s there and will still work if you don’t open that menu, but opening the menu wipes it out. This bugs me because I’ve always bought phone that allowed you to customize it your way. I knew that custom ringtones were not a part of the 1.0 firmware of the iPhone, but I had faith that Apple would remedy that soon after.
Their remedy was one which appeased the record companies and not the customers. You have to pay for a song from the iTunes Music Store IF it’s allowed to be turned into a ringtone in the first place, and then pay an extra 99 cents to allow it to be a ringtone. Why? Because there’s some bass-ackward law about what a ringtone is. Despite the fact that you can blast Rob Zombie from your car at 100dB, because you want that to be triggered when you get a call, it’s considered a “public perfomance” and you need to pay extra for it. Horrendously stupid if you ask me, but ringtones are a multi-million dollar business and so, the customer gets screwed.
So now I’m without my custom ringtone for all callers, but the ones for my contacts are still in place. I sent a polite, but firm letter to Apple stating how disappointed I am with the situation. Even if I had to eat the 99 cents to convert the song to a ringtone, what bothers me is that I already paid for these tracks on CD! Since there’s no way for Apple to verify this, I would have to pay for the track through the iTMS a second time.
What’s even worse is that the 1.1.1 update encrypted the code necessary to do the changes we’ve been able to do in the past, so that makes modifying the iPhone even harder, if not impossible. I hope that Apple finds a solution to this that makes the record companies and customers happy.
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