Shortly after I spent the morning sifting through my MP3 collection, looking for that perfect beat to chop, edit and upload to my phone as a new ringtone, I stumbled across an old school search hack. Simply put, if you copy and paste the following code and “Google” it, your search will lead you to open indexes that contain downloadable music files.

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “Artist or Song Name Goes Here”

Turns out, if you tweak the search string just right, you can find free ringtones instead. Take for example, you are searching for free MP3 ringtones, you might use:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +”ringtones” +description +size +(mp3)

Oh, what’s that you say? My phone doesn’t support MP3 ringtones? No problem.

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”ringtones” +description +size +(qcp|mid|m4a|mp4)

As with the original hack, you can always go back in and specify an artist or song name. Unfortunately, not everybody uses the smartest naming conventions for their files so the search results can be slim pickings.

Happy ringtone hunting!