Page 329 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

$ yum install sox
2. Download the music that you have chosen to a working folder on your system
(/tmp is probably a suitable location). As an example, the following command
downloaded some nice piano music by Pachelbel for us:

$ wget http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Pachelbel%27s_Canon.ogg
3. Now we have to convert the song from ogg-Vorbis format to a format more suitable
to Asterisk:
$ sox Pachelbel\'s_Canon.ogg -r 8000 -c 1 -s -w moh1.wav resample -ql

You may also need to adjust the amplitude with the -v option.

We’ve now taken our source file, converted it to a .wav file suitable to Asterisk, †
and saved the resulting file as moh1.wav.
4. Almost done now. We just need to create a folder for the permanent home of the
new files (/tmp is certainly no place for them):

$ mkdir /var/lib/asterisk/mohwav
and then move them there:
$ mv *.wav /var/lib/asterisk/mohwav
5. Since we have placed our music files in a different folder from that where Asterisk
installs its sample music, we will need to change the configuration file to reflect
this. Edit your /etc/asterisk/musiconhold.conf file with one that contains the
following:
[default]
mode=files
directory=/var/lib/asterisk/mohwav
random=yes
As for what to play, that will depend on what image you want to project to your callers.
Regardless of your choice, you should keep some things in mind:

• People don’t actually want to be on hold, so they are not usually planning to be
there for long. This means that there is not much point in providing them with a
mind-expanding musical experience. If things go as they hope, they won’t be there
long enough to get into it.

† Note that we could have used any format that was compatible with Asterisk; we’ve just chosen .wav for this
example because it is easy for the CPU to transcode into μlaw/alaw/slin on the fly, yet remains easy to work
with in other environments.

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