[asterisk-users] A stupid problem with Playback

[Steve Matzura]

Acording to the book, I'm supposed to put things into what Asterisk 
thinks is its default audio file location, /var/lib/asterisk/sounds, and 
I'm supposed to be able to create a custom directory off of that path 
and use it in a relative-syntax way in the Playback directive, like so:


...

     same => n,Playback(mysounds/mygreeting)


I'm here to tell ya, it doesn't work on my system. However, if I write:


     same => n,Playback(/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/mydir/mygreeting)


it works fine. Where is the default directory defined? I search every 
configuration file and found no such definition.


And then there was this: When I finally got my system working after all 
the connectivity and extension-not-found and endpoint-not-found nonsense 
straightened out, I of course tried the hello-world standard startup 
test. It didn't work. Why? Because when you install Asterisk version 16 
from the Debian distro site, you don't get the core sounds, and when you 
do install the core sounds package, they don't get put into 
/var/lib/asterisk/sounds. Oh no--they get put into 
/usr/share/asterisk/sounds. In there, I found several directories such 
as 'en' and 'en_us'. I copied the files from the en_us directory into 
/var/lib/asterisk/sounds and hello-world worked fine. So then I created 
a custom directory and put my own things in it, changing the Playback 
statement to the first one above, and it failed. I have to specify the 
full path instead of using the relative syntax version thereof. This is 
technically not a problem, more just a curiosity as to why it didn't 
work the way I thought it's supposed to.