Voicemail Greeting

Hi Guys,
I am new to Asterisk and FreePBX so this may seem a silly question however I have searched around and cannot find a solution.
I have bought a professional voicemail greeting but I don’t know what to do with it. I have setup a voicemail box on one of the extensions and currently a caller is not greeted with any message. How can I copy across my voicemail message?
I am using Asterisk (Ver: 1.8.11.0) and FreePBX (Ver: 2.10.1.1).
Many thanks
James

When you say callers are not greeted with any message do you mean they just get silence? If so there is something fundamentally wrong as they should at least get the standard greeting.

What format are the new messages in that you want to upload. Asterisk won’t just play any format. Usually I go for WAV format, ulaw or alaw, 8-bit, 8k, mono.

Hi Lee,
Thanks for getting back to me.
I called from my mobile to test and when I get to the answer phone there is no message at all. If I speak and leave a message then it is recording as I can retrieve the message from the appropriate extension.
The file I have is in WAV format so hopefully that should be fine as per your guidelines however it is what I do with this file I need to know?
Thanks again for your help
James

If you’re not hearing any busy or unavailable announcements already then there could be an underlying problem.

All of the recordings used by Asterisk are in /var/lib/asterisk/sounds so you would need to replace files in there if you want to simple replace the existing recordings.

However if you can’t hear anything at the moment I’d find out why first.

Also just a WAV file might not be good enough. Many people record WAV files in stereo with higher quality (say 64k) which will not play in Asterisk so best to check on the actual format first.

18bit mono 8k.

the greet.wav busy.WAV and unavail.wav files (note .wav not .WAV) should return

file greet.wav
greet.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, mono 8000 Hz

the WAV file is compressed nd there might be othert formats depending on the line in /etc/asterisk/voicemail.

format= wav|wav49

It is important also th note that these files need to be owned by asterisk

ls -l greet.wav
-rwx-w---- 1 asterisk asterisk 2595 Dec 6 2007 greet.wav

root@fax:~ $

Thanks very much Lee and Dicko for your help!
To be honest I bought this PBX system from eBay (Asterisk and freePBX) installed on a PC and I think I can do a better job and will learn more if I start from scratch and do my own installation (I am also not sure it is configured correctly and there are a lot of errors in the freePBX overview screen).
I have a server which I no longer need so I will purchase the required cards and do it myself and then I can use this customer voicemail message we have.
Dicko, I have the file in 8khz 16bit format so this should be fine - thanks for the assistance.
Cheers
James