Yuck.

It was disconcerting, but I suspect if the technology were more popular, I'd get used to that.

A bigger problem is that the audio encoder/decoder on my phone is optimized for ... the human voice. This allows it to operate quite efficiently at transmission and have very high quality ... for the human voice. (and not very young humans either - I can't understand my three year old on the phone). Please note that instrumental music is not the human voice, although it may have singing along with it.

The quality of the music was so bad that I have no idea what the song was; I am not certain I can even name the genre.

When my colleague answered, there was no pause between the music and the voice, so I missed the fact that he had answered. The two sounds, music then his voice, were both organic and a bit muddled. With the standard ring, the sound switches from a mechanical noise to an organic noise: even if you do not understand what was said, you have a good idea that it was a human.

Finally, Cingular's ad for their version of ring back tones (Answertones, which is a pretty good name) refers to the "boring old rings". Well, those "boring old rings" give me all sorts of information - it's easy to count them, so I get a measure of time. They help me decide whether the call went to voicemail because the phone was off, because the call was sent there, or because the call was not answered. Instead of getting all that useful information, I held the noise away from my ear and just waited. Yuck.