Undercrank

Uploading your own ringtunes to the NEC e606

The article below was written by me back in April 2003 but never published - Having discovered it in a bit of a virtual 'spring clean', I think the information still stands, although I doubt many of the handsets are widely in use.

Getting started

You will need a MIDI file that is no larger than 20k, and set to be in format 0 - more on that in a second. First up, you'll need to download midi1to0 and unzip it somewhere useful. Using this utility, you can convert your .mid file to MIDI format 0 that the handset expects. For example, run from the command line:

midi1to0 mytune.mid mytune2.mid

At this point you can then go ahead and upload the file using the NEC utility on the CD that came with your handset, however it will show up as "No Title" in the playlist. It's a bit fiddly to fix this (unless you fancy using a hex editor) but it can be done with another couple of tools. If you're up to the job, go ahead and download and unzip midi2txt and txt2midi. Once you've got hold of them you'll need to run the midi2txt tool as follows:

midi2txt mytune2.mid mytune2.txt

Next, open up the newly created mytune2.txt with notepad or similar. A few lines down there will be a line that defines the content of of the first MIDI track that will look much like this:

mtrk // multichannel track  // track 1

The e606 uses the MIDI meta data named "Text" to store track titles. To put one in this file, add a line like this underneath the one above and save the updated file:

  text "My Tune"

Finally, to recompile the MIDI file from your text file use the txt2midi utility you downloaded earlier. You can use the same .mid filename as before, and it'll simply overwrite it.

txt2midi mytune2.txt mytune2.mid

Conclusion

Your MIDI is now correctly titled and ready to upload. (But on the other hand, it didn't cost you two quid.)