I'm thrilled with my Motorola RAZR, but I hear the same damn Motorola rings everywhere I go. However, I don't want my phone singing a tune. I want a more traditional ring that, well, rings. Digitized phone bells seem silly. Ideally, I'd like to find a wide selection of the sort of synthetic rings that the human factors gnomes of the then-monolotic Bell Laboratories tested against thousands of subjects for their ability to be heard without being annoying.

Any ideas where to find MP3 (or MIDI) version of such rings?

I can't help you, but I have to chime in and say that when I got my new phone I cycled through all of the tones listening for the one I considered least obnoxious. I settled on a soft tone that beeps like a microwave or an alarm clock. The tone cuts through, but doesn't jolt me like every other one does. The only thing is that I seem to be the only one who feels this way. EVERYONE comments that my phone is obnoxious, which I find strange coming from those who use a patriotic march as a ring tone (not that I have any problems with patriotic marches, but it's very distracting when it blares out of someone's cube just a few feet away). I guess everyone has their own tastes.

Why do ring tones have to be so obnoxious?

Is it the tone, or the phone?

IMHO, the only professional/business "ringtone" is vibrate mode.

The problem with vibrate mode is that you don't always feel it. I use the "vibrate + ring" mode, most of the time, only going to "vibrate only" where ringing would be socially unacceptable (e.g., in a movie).

Here is mine (attached). I got the wav from some Flash animation web tools site like 5 years ago and just recently converted to mp3 for my phone.

I have noticed however that the ringtone getting the most popular is "vibrate" but in my line of work, it doesn't work too well.

I couldn't agree more, I could understand if he/she was a heart surgeon on call or something, but when it's just a kid, what's the point? If it's important they'll leave a message. I have had a bloke hold a conversation on his phone once, sounded like an IT support call. He got some quite serious verbal abuse from the other members of the audience because of that. How does that guy live with himself being such a wanker?

OOOh.. Nice.... That'll be in the suggestion box next time round.

That'd be a lawsuit waiting to happen here. The sad part is that I'm not entirely sure the theater would win.

You get them in the UK as well but they are illegal. Some hotels have been known to install them to force guests to use the hotel phone. They were all over the Sunday papers about a year back.