[asterisk-users] Quality problems with ISDN PRI

[Matt Florell]

On 4/25/08, Jared Smith <jsmith at digium.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-04-25 at 18:48 +0000, Arthur wrote:
>  > I still hope someone would enlighten us by his experience in doing
>  > call recordings without  recording to RAM Drive.
>
>
> I can't speak for Steve's solution (as I'm not sure exactly what he's
>  doing) but I could take a stab in the dark and guess that he's capturing
>  the audio at the network layer (on a completely different box than
>  Asterisk is running on) and recording it from there.  But that's just a
>  guess...

To address several points:

OrecX (http://www.orecx.com/) can do call recording outside of the
Asterisk core using several different methods depending on your needs
and channeltypes. In fact even with Sangoma TDM cards you can capture
audio at the kernel level and send the audio as RTP streams very
efficiently(3% CPU load for 92 channels) to an OrecX server on your
network. It must be mentioned that setting up Orecx with retrieval
might be a little complex for some Asterisk users, especially if you
are recording a large amount of calls, or are recording on more than
one Asterisk server, and if you choose this route you would do well to
hire an experienced consultant(or contact Oreca directly) to do the
install for you.

As far as Asterisk-based recording, writing to a RAM drive(or tmpfs)
is about your only option if you are planning on doing more than 50
concurrent recordings, if you are using Asterisk it is a viable and
tested solution. I have several client systems that are recording well
over 50 calls concurrently on a daily basis this way.

If you will be recording directly to hard drives with any frequency or
volume I would strongly recommend NOT using standard IDE or SATA hard
drives, they burn up and fast. Use a caching SCSI drive controller
with some high quality SCSI drives and you can record to those drives
for years even at 40 concurrent channels recording all day every day.

Hope that helps,

MATT---