CNET Video review of Sharetones for Android - 4.5 Stars!

Sharetones now integrates the Ringdroid ringtone editor and takes it a step higher with fade-in and fade out for each tone created.

Sharetones, by DJ Nitrogen, turns music on your Android phone into ringtones, alarms and notifications. Share ringtones legally with others who like the same music as you.

The new Motorola Backflip demo’d at CES. It sports an interesting design with a touch screen and touch pad behind the touch screen. Plus, a flip-over keyboard - hence the name. DJ Nitrogen loves it because, as an Android phone, it will absolutely rock with Sharetones, freeing up every song on the phone as a legally shared ringtone.

(Video from Digital Trends)

San Francisco, CA – DJ Nitrogen, creator of the Sharetones™ family of ringtone apps, announced today that it has been granted Patent No. 7,610,044 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. “This is our core process that lets users legally share ringtones between their mobile devices and enables providers to unlock users’ music with pre-edited ringtones,” said DJ Nitrogen CEO Chris Sindoni. “We believe this is the future of the ringtone business.”

The patent covers the method of sharing ringtone content independent of the audio content used to generate the ringtone. DJ Nitrogen refers to this as the recipe-sharing model. The “ringtone recipe” is the meta-data that extracts the ringtone from the full audio track, including start and end points, fade in/out and effects. DJ Nitrogen matches music on a user’s phone or media device with the ringtone recipes created by other users. These recipes are stored in the DJ Nitrogen cloud. Each recipe is made available to everyone in the DJ Nitrogen ecosystem who owns the source audio. This gives users instant access to a huge and growing selection of ringtones for music they love. The platform is fully compliant with copyright laws because users share only the recipe; they never share the source audio content. In the same manner that users share these recipes, providers can deliver professionally pre-edited recipes to their subscribers using the patented DJ Nitrogen process.

DJ Nitrogen leverages the explosive growth in smart-phones and the trend in full track music downloads to these mobile devices. The ringtone recipes are created and shared by users of the Sharetones ringtone editing applications, including Sharetones for the iPhone. The company’s new smart-phone apps, starting with Sharetones for Android, complete the ecosystem loop. They give music fans access to a huge catalog of ringtones, including over 95,000 recipes created by Sharetones users. The recipe matching happens in the background, so smart-phone users just preview and select their ringtones. The patent granted today also covers DJ Nitrogen’s process for checking if the source audio sought by the shared recipe is not available on the local device and automatically obtaining a licensed copy of that audio. This enables ringtones to be the point of music discovery, encouraging full track purchases from partner music retailers.

About DJ Nitrogen:
San Francisco based DJ Nitrogen is changing the way consumers and media providers engage with digital media by empowering an ecosystem that unleashes user creativity,  protects copyright holders and delivers added revenue to media companies and carriers. The company has several patents (issued and pending) for the technology that powers its platform. CEO Sindoni and the development team are veterans of numerous large consumer Internet brands and start-ups. Visit www.djnitrogen.com for more information and to download a free Sharetones product.

Contact:

Bill Hensley - VP Marketing
DJ Nitrogen
bill.hensley @ djnitrogen.com
415-869-8859 x 716

The latest Sharetones for Android phones released to the Android Marketplace September 29th. Sharetones matches the songs on Android users’ phones with ringtone “recipes” for those same songs, made by users of the Sharetones desktop apps. This gives Android users instant access to ringtones.

Since these recipes are user-edited, the new ratings feature allows the Android users to rate them up or down, thus bubbling the best edits to the top.

The new Sharetones also features enhanced speed and adds a waveform graphic that shows the location of the ringtone within the song.

Sharetones is a new breed of ringtone solution, leveraging the trends in whole-song downloads and providing a social ecosystem for makers and consumers of music ringtones.

Sharetones is compatible with all Android phones, including the G1 and MyTouch. As the name implies, Sharetones are “ringtones you share.” It doesn’t matter what type of phone you have, and since what is really being shared is the metadata that defines each ringtone recipe, Sharetones is a truly legal method of sharing ringtones.

More information is available at www.djnitrogen.com.

Yes, Apple has realized that:

1. There is still plenty of life left in the ringtone category.

2. The old Apple model (buy it twice) wasn’t working.

3. Services like Sharetones are a much better deal for anyone wanting iPhone ringtones.

DJ Nitrogen recently released the latest upgrade to its Sharetones ringtone app for Android, and the new Sharetones 1.1 app has already outpaced the original Beta launch.

The latest Sharetones is significantly faster when checking a user’s song library against the DJ Nitrogen ringtone recipe database, particularly important for users with large music collections on their phones. Sharetones 1.1 also makes it easier to assign ringtones directly to contacts from within the app.

Android users can download Sharetones for freee at the Android Marketplace.

By the way, it looks great on the new myTouch!

More information is at djnitrogen.com.

As you’ve likely read, a Federal jury  found a 32-year-old Minnesota woman, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, guilty of illegally downloading music from the Internet and fined her $1.9 million, That’s $80,000 each for 24 songs.

User’s of DJ Nitrogen’s Sharetones don’t need to worry about the legality of sharing ringtones. That’s because with Sharetones users only share the metadata what we call the “recipe” - for songs they already own. The simple ideas can save you a lot of money.

DJ Nitrogen rocks Mobile Incubation Week

Last week DJ Nitrogen joined several other innovative mobile companies at Microsoft’s Window Mobile Incubation Week. While we didn’t take home the top prize, we received rave reviews on our legal solution to sharing content. Most of you who follow us will think we’re just about ringtones - Sharetones as we call them - but that’s just the start. DJ Nitrogen connects the ecosystem with benefits for users, providers and copyright holders alike.

This video captures CEO Chris Sindoni, VP Product Boris Ratchev and Developer Ilan Caspi during the event discussing the DJ Nitrogen platform, Windows Mobile and the Mobile Incubation Week.

Interesting story from NPR about the power of ringtones in Tibet.

All Things Considered, February 25, 2009 · Police in Tibet have swept markets in recent months looking for banned music. Chinese state media report that police have arrested several suspects for allegedly downloading to their cell phones music that the government considers “reactionary.”

Woeser, who goes by only one name like many Tibetans, is one of Tibet’s most outspoken authors. Recently, the Beijing-based writer has been blogging about the hidden world of reactionary ringtones, subversive songs and dissident downloads.

(The full story is at the link above.)

“Oh No You Didn’t” from the Mercenaries 2: World In Flames game/commercial was the top ringtone among users of the DJ Nitrogen Ringtone Lab last week. Here’s the link to the track from the Pandemic Studios site: http://www.pandemicstudios.com/mercenaries/downloads.php.

With the DJ Nitrogen Ringtone Lab, you can listen to all the “Oh No You Didn’t” ringtones made by Ringtone Lab users, or you can make your own.

Some of you have heard that DJ Nitrogen is giving away free evaluation copies of our very cool Ringtone Lab for the iPhone. But you have to know where to look - or be a reader of this blog because it’s rather hidden at DJ Nitrogen. Click here for Free iPhone Ringtones and download the Ringtone Lab. This free version only works with the iPhone and it won’t be free forever, so get it now and sync all the free iPhone ringtones you’d like. Consider it a perk for owning a very cool phone. It’s fast, easy, and as we said, free. Don’t bother with all that “Here’s how to get free ringtones using iTunes” stuff. You know, like “Go to the “Options” tab, then find the “Start Time” and “Stop Time” check boxes to set your length… Right-click on your “ringtone length” song and choose “Convert Selection to AAC” plus four or five other steps.

Skip all those steps - just get the Ringtone Lab for the iPhone while it’s still free.

About that last post: Of course we’re thrilled that these new iPhone users, regardless of their country, will be able to turn any songs in their music collections into ringtones using the DJ Nitrogen Ringtone Lab. They can access ringtone recipes made by others or create new recipes from songs they own.

Every day we’re impressed by the vaiety of ringtones made by DJ Nitrogen users. They’re not just from the latest T-Pain collaborations, but even go back to the 60’s with classic tracks from artists like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Van Morrison.

Check out the Ringont Lab for the iPhone at http://www.djnitrogen.com/iphonedownload.html

This was reported today by Tech Crunch:

“Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics giant that produces the iPhone 3G for Apple, has ramped up production to 800,000 units per week, says a source close to Apple with direct knowledge of the numbers. This is “above current full capacity” and there may be some concerns with quality control.

Apple sold just 6 million of its first generation iPhones.

Foxconn factories will be able to ramp production up significantly over time, says our source. But at current sell rates, the company is producing iPhones at a run rate of over 40 million units per year, well beyond early estimates of demand for the product of 25 million over the 3G product lifecycle.

Apple is continuing to add countries - the iPhone is available in 23 countries today, and another 50 will be added this year. We’ve heard that Foxconn was initially told to expect sales of up to 40 million units in the first year, but that those numbers are being revised upwards sharply.

About 1 billion mobile phones were sold worldwide in 2007, says Gartner (Nokia sold about 435 million of them).”