[asterisk-users] MusicOnHold Files

[Trevor Peirce]

Carla Schroder wrote:
> On Thursday 04 January 2007 18:01, Forrest Beck wrote:
>   
>> [snip] Currently I am taking music
>> from a CD (our campus jazz band has recorded a CD), converting to WAV,
>> using Audacity to convert the stereo tracks into mono, drop the gain
>> to -15db, then I use sox to convert to GSM and 8 bit (by typing #>
>> /usr/bin/sox file1.wav -r 8000 -c1 file2.gsm resample -ql )
>>     
>
> Since telephones are so lo-fi, is there any reason to invest a lot of energy 
> in hi-fi hold music? .wav is uncompressed and lossless, so it should sound 
> better than .gsm which is a lossy format. But I doubt anyone can really tell 
> the difference on a telephone. anyway, how long are you leaving your callers 
> on hold? :)
>   
I would stay far away from .gsm -- I'd go for ulaw or even just leave it 
as WAV and let asterisk transcode from there if needed.  You'll probably 
notice a difference -- music degrades much worse than voice with the low 
bitrate codecs.