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Nokia was looking at some of its numbers when somebody noticed that the popularity of classical music ringtones was pretty high, second most popular in fact. So did they shrug this inane newes off with amused sighs and feeble “that’s neat”s? Not at all. They went out and hired a whole 55-piece orchestra to whip up 25 more. Overkill maybe?
The orchestra was commissioned to perform and record 25 original ‘miniatures’ composed by Nokia’s in-house ‘sound designers’. Hopefully for all of us those aren’t the same sound designers that were behind Nokia’s god-awful dubstep ringtone remix. Some of the recordings are already rolling out to Lumia 820s and 920s, with some being saved for upcoming phones. All things considered, if this is what the people want, you can’t fault Nokia for trying to give it to them, but it kind of makes you wonder, right? I mean, what have they got in store for the number one ,ost popular ringtone type? [The Telegraph]
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“Nokia Hired An Entire Orchestra Just To Put Out a Couple of Measly Ringtones”
A ‘couple’ tends to mean ‘two’, even common parlance doesn’t stretch this much beyond 3 or 4, but calling 25 pieces of music a ‘couple’ is disingenuous, it’s as if you felt the need to but a cynical spin on the story – which is essentially “Nokia produce 25 classical ring tones” – quite why Gizmodo feel the need to be shitty about stories like this is a bit of a puzzle.
Orchestras are cheap, I use a 20+ piece often (music for TV/film) , you can have a good 22 piece with an arranger for £3-4k – for the whole day – and they are happy to record as much stuff as you throw at them, I’ve also used orchestras over in Poland where they are dirt cheap (£1,500 quid for the day) and they never require multiple takes, they tend to be so professional that you give them a piece to record, and they hit it perfectly first time every time.
A few grand for Nokia to produce 25 ring tones is nothing.
If it had been Apple that had hired the orchestra no doubt there would have been an article praising them for going the extra mile and producing high quality ringtones
It’s really hard to tell to be honest, Gizmodo seem to like to shit on everyone from time to time, Apple included – it’s not a big deal, just puzzling why they feel the need to act like pissy 14 year old school kids ? A phone company has made some (presumably well produced) ringtones and a tech blog manages to extract ‘measly’, ‘inane’, ‘feeble’, ‘overkill’, ‘god-awful’ (etc) from the story.
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What has gizmodo got against Nokia :S I myself love classical ringtones, they are the only ones I use. I was seriously considering ordering a Nokia Lumia 920 to replace my iPhone anyway and this has just sealed the deal.
“What has gizmodo got against Nokia”
Probably nothing, I think what’s happening is a in-house style or culture is slowly being reified within Gizmodo HQ (or at least at the editorial level), and the editorial style they are gravitating towards is a kind of mildly dismissive cynicism – this is often a way of framing issues beyond one’s personal scope of knowledge – you pick out those things you are familiar with and criticise them as a kind of way of empowering yourself or making yourself part of the larger conversation.
There’s a term for this, but I can’t for the life of me think what it is right now.
Holy spelling mistakes Batman!