[Asterisk-Users] mpg123 issue and solution

[Chris Maresca]

All,

I've been setting up an Asterisk PBX over the past few days and I stumbled
across a problem with mpg123 that I have not seen documented anywhere.

If you put mp3 files into your mohmp3 directory and these files have ID3v2
tags, mpg123 will throw an error message "Found new ID3 Header",
regardless of the -q flag.  

This, in turn, will cause Asterisk to crash (yes), although it's a soft
crash (exits cleanly).

It took me forever to figure this out, since the default mp3 and
everything else was working fine.  And the lack of any meaningfull error 
messages made diagnosis even more difficult....

My work around was to open the file in WinAmp and remove the ID3 tags
entirely.  mpg123 and Asterisk were both happy and there was much
rejoycing.

It might be a good idea to move away from mpg123 as it is no longer
supported and there are bound to be more problems like this.  MAD seems to
be what everyone is migrating to...  At the very least, not hardcoding a
player into the codebase would probably be a good idea (if it is
hardcoded, I couldn't find a config file for it...).

On a seperate note, if anyone is have problems registering SIP softphones,
like the most excellent xTen X-Lite, try commenting out 'bindaddr' in
sip.conf.  That allowed me to register and get everything working.

Finally, if anyone has any ideas about how to improve IAX voice quality,
I'd be happy to hear them.  Everything is hearable, but there are an
awfull lot of clicks and pops in the background.  The machine is a Celeron
500 with 128mb of RAM and Gentoo 1.4 (w/latest gentoo updates) and
Asterisk 0.7.2.  I'm the only one using the machine ATM and it's about 2
ft from my desk with a dedicated hub...  There is no telephony hardware
install currently.  

SIP quality seems slightly better, and I've tried almost every WinIAX
client out there, they're all pretty much the same.  I'm using the
soundcard in my laptop and a Plantronics headset.  Playback of the IVR
prompts generally sounds good, but inter-client communication is noisy.

Thx.

Chris.