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forum.voxilla.com/asterisk-support-forum/music-hold-issues-16924.html - 59k -

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Posted by crouse

Any popular PBX system offers the ability to supply a source of music to be played for callers while on hold. Asterisk allows for a lot of creativity in this regard.
Nowadays, everyone is familiar with the MP3 music format, and there is a lot of interest in using MP3s as a music-on-hold source. The concept sure seems like a good idea, but there are a few things that we think should be given some consideration.

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Posted by adalson007

Music on Hold:

Any popular PBX system offers the ability to supply a source of music to be played for
callers while on hold. Asterisk allows for a lot of creativity in this regard.
Nowadays, everyone is familiar with the MP3 music format, and there is a lot of interest
in using MP3s as a music-on-hold source. The concept sure seems like a good idea, but
there are a few things that we think should be given some consideration:
Music on Hold | 299• MP3 files are extremely complex, and require a substantial amount of CPU to
decode. If you have a lot of channels pulling music from the system (for example,
people sometimes like to listen to music through their phone, or a call center may
have several callers on hold), the load on the CPU caused by all of the transcoding
of the stored MP3 files could place too much demand on a machine that is otherwise
suitable to the performance needs of the system.
• Current-generation hard drives hold a lot of data, so there may not be any reason
to worry about cutting down hard drive use. Compressed audio makes sense from
a distribution standpoint (an MP3 is a much smaller download than the equivalent
in .wav format), but once on your system, do we really care how much space they
take up?
• MP3 files don’t usually come with the right sort of licensing. ;-)

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Posted by sagitraz