music on hold [was: Re: [Asterisk-Users] A Few Questions]

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Sun, Jun 05, 2005 at 11:06:48PM -0400, C. Hatton Humphrey wrote:

> I have Asterisk running on a FreeBSD machine that is also my
> router/firewall and MySQL server.  

Asterisk is a CPU-intesive program. It will probably work fine with a
router/firewall, but with another potentially-CPU-intensive program like
mysql, you may have problems.

Actually, the previous paragraph was over-simplistic. What asterisk
really needs is "fast access" to the CPU: low latency" is important,
otherwise calls may sound jaggy.

So make sure MySQL won't compete with Asterisk on the CPU.

> It is running fine and I've gotten
> it working with FWD and will be testing a direct IAX server in the
> next few days.  I'm migrating from a Packet8 Virtual Office setup and
> have managed to get their "DTA-310" working on my installation.
> 
> Here are my questions.-

Next time please give a proper subject to your message, please.

> 1. Does anyone have suggestions for license-friendly MOH sources? 
> Same for reworks of the voicemail and autoattendant prompting?

What exactly is your problem with the existing MOH of asterisk?

It is freely distributable and can be freelly used *as MOH only*. If you
want to use it for anything else you indeed have a problem, which is why
Debian have removed it from the package (as it is indeed non-free).
But if you just want it as music-on-hold, there shouldn't be a problem
with it.

For that reason we have silently re-added those files to our (Xorcm
Rapid) repository. To prevent any potential license confusion the MOH
files are packed in a separate package with a clear license. It also
make sense from a size point of view: most of the size of the asterisk
source package is the 3 MOH files that are practically guaranteed to
never change. No point in including them in the distribution.

Another source of MOH files is the classical music collection from
Signate: http://signate.com/moh.php
I'll probably package some of those in a MOH deb pretty soon.

However: why do we need a high quality 44khz stereo MP3 music only to be
decoded at runtime and then converted to 8khz mono? Wouldn't it cost
more to save it in advance as wav with "phone quality"? No real quality
lost, not too much disk space lost, and a lot of CPU time saved, isn't
it?

Not to mention avoiding a format that is widely recognized as
patent-encombered.

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