If you plan on selling Asterisk-based telephone systems and you do not change the default music on hold that ships with Asterisk, you are sending the message, loud and clear, that you don’t really know what you are doing.[41]
Part of the problem with music on hold is that while in the past it was common to just plug a radio or CD player into the phone system, the legal reality is that most music licenses do not actually allow you to do this. That’s right: if you want to play music on hold, somebody, somewhere, typically wants you to pay them for the privilege.
So how to deal with this? There are two legal ways: 1) pay for a music on hold license from the copyright holder, or 2) find a source of music that is released under a license suitable for Asterisk.
We’re not here to give you legal advice; you are responsible for understanding what is required of you in order to use a particular piece of music as your music on hold source. What we will do, however, is show you how to take the music you have and make it work with Asterisk.
It’s quite common to have music in MP3 format these days. While Asterisk can use MP3s as a music source, this method is not at all ideal. MP3s are heavily compressed, and in order to play them the CPU has to do some serious work to decompress them in real time. This is fine when you are only playing one song and want to save space on your iPod, but for music on hold, the proper thing to do is convert the MP3 to a format that is easier on the CPU.
If you are familiar with the file
formats and have some experience working with audio engineering software
such as Audacity, you can convert the files on your PC and upload them
to Asterisk. We find it is simpler to upload the source MP3 files to the
Asterisk server (say, to the /tmp
folder), and then convert them from the command line.
To convert your MP3 files to a format
that Asterisk understands, you need to run the commands outlined here
(in this example we are using a file named SilentCity.mp3).
First, convert the MP3 file to a WAV file:
$mpg123 -w SilentCity.wav SilentCity.mp3
Then, downsample the resulting WAV file to a sampling rate that Asterisk understands:
$sox SilentCity.wav -t raw -r 8000 -s -w -c 1 SilentCity.sln
If you have not done so already, install sox, and the libsox-fmt-all package:
# sudo apt-get install sox libsox-fmt-allThen, convert your MP3 file directly to the uncompressed SLN format:
$sox SilentCity.mp3 -t raw -r 8000 -s -w -c 1 SilentCity.sln
The resulting file will exist in the
/tmp folder (or wherever you
uploaded to) and needs to be copied to the /var/lib/asterisk/moh folder:
$cp *.sln /var/lib/asterisk/moh
You now need to reload musiconhold in Asterisk in order to have it recognize your new files:
$asterisk -rx "module unload res_musiconhold.so"$asterisk -rx "module load res_musiconhold.so"
To test that your music is working
correctly, add the following to the [UserServices] context in your
dialplan:
exten => 664,1,NoOp()
same => n,Progress()
same => n,MusicOnHold()
Dialing 664 from one of
your sets should play a random file from your moh directory.
[41] Note that Leif uses the default music, but his excuse is that he’s lazy and wants to go and play Forza on his Xbox. The cobbler’s kids have no shoes.