[Asterisk-Users] disabling "comfort noise", other odd thoughts

[Steve Kann]

Mike Taht wrote:

> Lately I've been working in relative isolation (e.g. at home) and I 
> find I like the idea of sharing a virtual audio room with my fellow 
> programmers. (We all share thoughts currently via irc).
>
> So I'm listening in a asterisk conference room right now (using 
> SJphone, everyone mic muted), and also listening to Bach, both on my 
> headphones. During especially quiet passages I can hear the slight 
> crackle of static (generated by SJphone?), similarly while talking 
> with someone...
>
> I imagine that most people like "comfort noise" - but we've been 
> trained to like it by the existing phone system! me, I'd prefer 
> something visual as comfirmation that the other party was still there 
> - and even without that visual comfirmation I'd prefer blissful 
> silence in my background world.
>
> Is there any way to turn off "comfort noise?". Does asterisk itself 
> ever generate comfort noise? (I had no idea until I started writing 
> this that it was actually an rfc 
> (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3389.html) - and with a sufficiently 
> smart packet filter I could block it if I wanted to, at least across 
> the network )
>
> Side question: Is there a (soft or hard) solution to allowing the 
> silence suppression part of the sip spec to work in asterisk?


It still needs to be worked on, I think.  There is a comfort-noise frame 
type now, but I don't think it's implemented in SIP, IAX, or any apps.

I imagine that when it is implemented, you'd be able to tell your 
user-agent (soft/hard phone) to not actually generate comfort noise when 
it gets comfort-noise frames.

-SteveK