Using system GSM sounds instead of your own WAVs

There are some areas of freepbx where the system allows you to supply your own wav files. For example, if you want your IVR to play an announcement message, you have to record your own… even if a perfectly suitable one exists among the many GSM files on your system.

Two workarounds:
1 - convert the sound file you want to a WAV, and put it where freepbx expects to find it. ie:
sox /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/pls-wait-connect-call.gsm -r 8000 -c 1 -w -s /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/custom/pls-wait-connect-call.wav

Now you have a properly formatted wav file that freepbx will offer, just as if you recorded it yourself.

2 - You can instead update the MySQL database for a particular feature. It’s so simple, that I wonder if the freepbx developers might just make these audio files available to us. ie:
update ringgroups set annmsg = ‘pls-wait-connect-call’ where grpnum = ‘400’;

That would update the answer message to the ‘please wait while I connect your call’ message, rather than whatever was there before. freepbx uses the ‘custom/’ prefix to identify wav files in the /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/custom/ directory, but drop the prefix and it correctly plays the gsm files one directory level up. It’s almost as if this feature was created and then not completed. Now if only freepbx wouldn’t overwrite the database fix, it would be perfect.

So consider this a feature request. Can we have a check box or something so we can select from either a custom recorded audio or a system supplied one?

In the mean time, convert the GSM to wav and you can play around with all those built-in sounds.

  • Jason