[asterisk-users] asterisk music on hold recommendations

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 02:30:24PM +0200, Frederic Van Espen wrote:
> 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?

Short version: Not really. But just use the built in 

The earliest moh support Asterisk had was playing of MP3 files (or
piping the output of an external command). Only later on "native" MoH
was developed - playing any file Asterisk could play.

At the time Digium licensed a set of mp3 files from FreePlay Music that
could be freely used as MoH files with Asterisk.

Later on a certain more subtle licensing issue came up and Digium chose
to stop distributing those MoH files with Asterisk. They were replaced
with a set of five files which are:

* Longer
* Better licensed (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
* Available in all the required formats

So the licensing issues in question are:

* MP3 is patent-encumbered and some Linux distribution keep out even MP3
  playing code (other only remove MP3 encoding code).
* If you don't intend to play it to a MP3 channel, why waste CPU
  resources on transcoding it? The newer files are available in more
  convinient formats. IIRC the license of the FPM ones prevented Digium
  from distributing modified copies.


> 
> I am currently using asterisk 1.8 with the mpg123 processes
> (mode=mp3 or mode=quietmp3 in the conf file). 

If you use that mode, you're probably doing something wrong following an
ancient guide.

> 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?

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
icq#16849755              jabber:tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com
+972-50-7952406           mailto:tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com
http://www.xorcom.com  iax:guest at local.xorcom.com/tzafrir