This collection is intended to include as many unique Nokia ringtones as possible, to save you the lengths of downloading individual packs of models and digging through them. There's a lot of gems here by many composers in many genres. All of these are metatagged with relevant information, such as the title, year and artist. A rough genre (either electronic, pop, dance, R&B, hip hop, rock, retro*, generic*, ambient, world) is also tagged in each one so that you can sort through them more easily.
It was fun to put this collection together. Even though I actually didn't grow up with Nokia phones and didn't hear most of these until 2020, I have a relatively new-found fondness for their ringtones, as an enjoyer of obscure music and vintage technology. I've also been able to find out a lot of information about the in-house sound team, as well as contractors such as Epic Sound and PlusFourSix. It's amazing how much information can be unearthed about a topic that was previously rather opaque. Nokia may have wanted to keep their composers anonymous, but I don't: the world deserves to know who was behind these gems.
* "Retro" is used for monophonic ringtones to distinguish them from other ringtones, due to them having such a distinctive sound. "Generic" refers to ones that are designed to be simplistic and genre-neutral.
What's included?
I have included over 2500+ ringtones and sounds here in total. So there's a lot of content for you to consume!
These ringtones/sounds are known to exist, but have not been included as I cannot find or am unable to record them:
The following monophonic ringtones do not have recordings yet: several unnamed Type x ringtones from pre-1998 models, Baroque, Bounce 1, Buoy, Charleston, Cladoceran, Classical, Cuckoo Clock, Danube, Development, Doorbell, Dragon, Electrify, Four Seasons, Frantic, Fusion 1, German Dance, Happy Birthday, HipHop, Hockey, Karelia Suite, Knock Again, Left Hand, L'italiana, Mezga, Modem, Morning, Nightingale, On the Fly, Pulse, Quick 1-5, Raindrops, Ready Steady Go, Right Hand, Ring, Rise'n Shine, Rush Hour, Sare Jahan Se Achchha, Swan Lake, Tangoed, Trepak, Two Minutes, Volatile, Wake Up, Walze Brilliant, Whistle 1.
Afternoon 1 (original version) - Hannu af Ursin has confirmed "Afternoon 1 (Arranged)" is a MIDI-to-audio remix and was not originally composed by him; the original is not known to have appeared on any phone.
Kung Fu Dream - A regional ringtone; no firmware for the models this appears on (such as the Nokia 3806) has been found
N-Gage Tune - The default ringtone of the Nokia N-Gage QD. It does not play properly in any of the players I used, either it crashes, has volume issues or sounds incorrect. The only solution I can see would be to record it from actual hardware (including other phones with the Mango bank).
Optimus (original version) - Aleksi Eeben confirmed that the final version has extra instrumentation added by Hannu; his original version only features the basic melody, and was never released.
Smokey Landscape (finished version) - can be heard here; this never appeared on any phone. The only version we have appears to be a demo before it was recorded by the jazz band.
Subhop (original version) - Hannu also confirmed this one was originally a MIDI; not known to have appeared on any phone. The MIDI version may have been sampled within the audio version though, as Large bank instruments can be heard throughout.
The following Mikko Tillander-composed ringtones that have not been released: Day off, Fair game, Highlander, On the jump, Pipperoo, Swing player (original monophonic version)
Four of the five regional ringtones heard here - one of these is "Fugitive" which did get used, but the other four are either very rare or unused
Two unused orchestral ringtones (apparently 25 of these were recorded, and if 23 of these were released then that means there's 2 that never made the cut)
Most Vertu ringtones - unfortunately, firmware for pre-2010 models is nowhere to be found online, so most of the ringtones here are from 2010 models (except Tranquil from older models, and the default ringtone Sandpiper). Post-2012 ringtones aren't included either because that's when Vertu spun off from Nokia, so including those might be a stretch.
There are certainly even more unused ones whose existence isn't known at all. Many of these were never released at all, and it is unlikely we'll ever find these. If there's anything else that you know of that I haven't included in this pack, then either I've never heard of it or I simply overlooked it, so let me know. If you're able to cleanly record any of the unrecorded ringtones listed above, please let me know.
These ringtones/sounds are not included here due to not being in the scope of this collection:
Carrier ringtones - even if many of these appeared on Nokia phones, they have nothing to do with Nokia.
Ringtones built into the operating system, such as Windows Phone ringtones - same reason as above. Even though Nokia was briefly under Microsoft's wing and was rebranded to Microsoft Mobile, Windows Phone itself never had anything to do with Microsoft Mobile; their ringtones were only included on their own phones.
Unofficial ringtones/sounds are not included, as this pack only covers official content. These include:
Fanmade ringtones, including covers of Nokia ringtones or fictional Nokia ringtones.
Fake ringtones; for example, there's a ringtone circulating on YouTube called "Crimson" but I cannot find any evidence that it is a real Nokia ringtone. There is also a YouTube channel uploading video ringtone versions of official ringtones, claiming that a Nokia employee supplied them, but these are very obviously fake.
The infamous "Nokia ringtone arabic" is actually not an official ringtone; Middle Eastern Nokia models just included the same ringtones as Western models until around 2010. The person who shot that video just loaded unofficial Arabic ringtone covers onto their phone.
UI sounds - I felt there wasn't much need to include these, since they usually don't hold much listening value and aren't customizable.
Music tracks - this would warrant a whole collection of its own, which I may consider in the future.
Poor recordings of the ringtones listed in the lost section - I don't want recordings like those to spread, and would rather not include these just to make the pack seem more complete.
Ringtones submitted to contests but didn't win - there's thousands of these and if I were to include them all then it would take up like 75% of the pack alone. The only exceptions are Noa Nakai's unused ringtones he submitted to the MikroBitti contests, and also Hannu af Ursin's job interview ringtone Tropical.
Alcatel ringtones - while Nokia acquired it in 2016 the brand is largely separate from Nokia and would warrant its own collection, especially as for the majority of the years this collection covers, Alcatel was separate from Nokia.
Notes
I've tried to include the best quality versions of each ringtone as possible. Unfortunately, some were only released in LQ. HQ stuff is included as FLACs to save space. AACs and AMRs have been converted to MP3 due to how janky those formats are, and including low quality sounds in FLAC is misleading and a waste of space.
Recordings of monophonic and MIDI files are included; the original files aren't included, but may be included in the future. Some recordings may also be replaced with better ones in the future. The recordings come from a variety of sources: most of them are my own recordings from Beatnik software, but many of them also came from Nokia's apps and people's hardware recordings.
There's many cases where ringtones share the same name. In this collection these are differentiated by numbers, so for example: Festive 1 and Festive 2. However, if another name exists then it is used instead (e.g there are two Dewdrop ringtones, one of them is also called Whales, so that title has been used to differentiate it). A weirder case is Toreador and Toreador 1, which are now Toreador 1 and Toreador 2 respectively, which represents the order in which they were introduced.
Years go by when the ringtone first appeared on a phone when possible, rather than when it was made (plus we don't have exact creation dates for most of these). Phone release years go by when it was released, not announced or approved. If the ringtone was never released, then the year goes by when it was made; if none is known, then the year it was leaked is just used. This might be an awkward system, but it's the best I can think of.
Alternate versions of ringtones are included if they hold creative value. If there's a version of a ringtone that adds new parts or has a noticeably different arrangement, that is included. But if it is simply transposed and optimized, then it is not included. Collecting every single minor edit of each ringtone would be time consuming and would clutter the pack.
For artist tags, the composer is tagged when possible. If it's a remix or arrangement by someone else, they are tagged instead. If none of the authors are known, then the tag is simply "Nokia" or the company that is known to have created it. (e.g Beatnik, PlusFourSix)
Many of the unused Beatnik ringtones use instruments assigned to programs that are absent from the Mango bank. I have included two versions of these: the originals played with the bank (which sound either empty or jarring), and unofficial edits which attempt to bring them closer to how they were likely intended to sound. It is believed that the bank underwent lots of changes, hence a lot of instruments are either missing or reallocated.
Tools used
Here is a list of tools in the making of this collection. Three of these are leaked internal Nokia tools!
Playback: Nokia Audio Suite, Nokia SP MIDI Player, PlayBAE, BeatnikX, Beatnik Player for Mobile Audio, Nokia Series 30 MIDI simulator, Nokia Internal Tune Editor
Recording: Audacity
Editing: Mp3tag, Cubase, Notepad++
Further links
Some links that may be of interest to you.
Ringtone Bangers + More - a social media project that posts ringtones and other consumer technology-related music
Nokia Design Team SoundCloud page - the SoundCloud account of Nokia Design Team (later Microsoft Phones Design), downloads are no longer available but most tracks are still online
Legacy Portable Computing Wiki - a wiki dedicated to information related to legacy portable devices, including phones - also includes pages about ringtone composers