[asterisk-users] A stupid problem with Playback

[asterisk at phreaknet.org]

On 5/27/2023 11:37 AM, Steve Matzura wrote:
> 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.

/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/en
Relative paths are relative to your language-specific directory.

> 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.

A great reason to avoid Asterisk packages and compile from source 
instead. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches.