System messages volume is WAY too loud

The messages like “The person at extension x is unavailable” and “your call cannot be completed as dialed” are VERY loud on speakerphone compared to voice volume. Even with speaker on a volume setting of 3 or 4, it can be heard all over the office.

I’d like to turn it down.

I have searched and searched, but I can’t find it addressed. It’s been years like this and I’ve spent an hour here and there trying to find a solution, but none found. This is my first post about the issue. Any ideas?

Thanks

Telephone systems don’t have a large dynamic range, so if you are saying these recordings are too loud, you are really saying that normal speech is too quiet. If you are using analogue lines, you should be able to increase the gain at the A/D conversion. If it digital all the way, the problem is in the source phones.

If you really want to waste some of the, limited, dynamic range, you will need to put all the recording files through something like sox and scale down all the levels.

SoX tutorial: Batch processing audio on the command line.

Look for ‘normalize’

Noting that you do not want the default parameters for normalise, as they will not make the sound quieter and may make it louder.

we use sox file.name -n stat for that so you won’t need to guess but 90% is usually about right and will raise or lower the energy proportionally between silence and 0db

Thank you guys for your assistance. I will give SoX a try. I just need to locate the files.
Are those recordings considered announcements or something else?

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