[asterisk-users] asterisk music on hold recommendations

[Frederic Van Espen]

Hi all,

I'm wondering what the recommendations are for using music on hold on 
asterisk. As far as I understood from various pages on the web and a 
response from the IRC channel, I am to avoid using mp3 files because of 
licensing and transcoding issues. correct?

I am currently using asterisk 1.8 with the mpg123 processes (mode=mp3 or 
mode=quietmp3 in the conf file). This means that there is one single 
shared stream of moh for all channels that are using the same class of 
moh. If I were to start using wav files (mode=files), is there a way to 
have the same kind of shared stream of moh to reduce the load on the 
machine in the case where a lot calls are on hold? Is it even worth it 
to try reducing the load (maybe asterisk handles playing wav files very 
efficiently and the extra load generated by it is negligible)?

I am looking to upgrade to asterisk 11 in the future. Is any of this 
different for that version?

Thanks for any responses!

Frederic