Synthetic-musicsmaf-yamaha.com spells it Synthetic music Mobile Application Format, with the word "music" not capitalized so it does not participate in the abbreviation SMAF. However one editor expressed concern that this odd capitalization pattern would confuse readers, so a hyphen is used here instead. mobile application format, abbreviated SMAF, is a music data format specified by

Yamaha Yamaha may refer to: * Yamaha Corporation, a Japanese company with a wide range of products and services, established in 1887. The company is the largest shareholder of Yamaha Motor Company (below). ** Yamaha Music Foundation, an organization estab ...

for portable electronic devices, such as

cell phones A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...

and PDAs. The file extension for SMAF is .MMF and is common as

ringtones A ringtone, ring tone or ring is the sound made by a telephone to indicate an incoming call. Originally referring to and made by the electromechanical striking of bells, the term now refers to any sound on any device alerting of a new incoming ...

for mobile phones with one of five sound chips. SMAF resembles

MIDI MIDI (; Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and re ...

, but also supports graphics and PCM sound playback. Its MIDI playback is produced via

FM synthesis Frequency modulation synthesis (or FM synthesis) is a form of sound synthesis whereby the frequency of a waveform is changed by modulating its frequency with a modulator. The frequency of an oscillator is altered "in accordance with the amplitude ...

or PCM

sample-based synthesis Sample-based synthesis is a form of audio synthesis that can be contrasted to either subtractive synthesis or additive synthesis. The principal difference with sample-based synthesis is that the seed waveforms are sampled sounds or instruments i ...

, where instrument data (parameters and/or PCM samples) is stored within the .MMF file itself, similar to

module file Module file (MOD music, tracker music) is a family of music file formats originating from the MOD file format on Amiga systems used in the late 1980s. Those who produce these files (using the software called music trackers) and listen to them f ...

s. This enables users to create custom instruments, which will sound exactly the same on devices with the same chip. The feature set used in SMAF files usually orients itself at the chips produced by Yamaha for playback:

External links

Yamaha's SMAF Website
{{tech-stub Music notation file formats