Comments on: The Music Frontier: Taming Streaming Audio for Music on Hold with Asterisk

By: Axel

Axel — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 02:23:11 +0000

Great!

I configure the Radio Stream and works perfect, but in a couple of hours of no using the MOH the music stop playing the only way to get back the stream is to restarting the Asterisk Service

Did anyone has the same problem????

Let me know how to solve it

I’ve been trying in 3 different computers and the same in all

Thanks to all!

By: William Fulton

William Fulton — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 05:12:20 +0000

Went to the forums to see if I could get this figured out. After 3 hours of running through this tutorial as well as tweaks recommended in the forum I still don't have it working. Worse, I signed up for the forums but it says I don't have permission to post in any of the forums. How am I supposed to get help? What I would really love is if someone could rewrite this for asterisk 1.8 purple. I can't get it to work and the forums have not been much help. WM: You're reading an article that is almost 7 years old. Did you try searching the PIAF Forums for more current information? I found the answer in less than a minute. As for posting, registrations are processed every couple of days. If you need assistance faster than that, there's always paid support. Looks like the comment above this one would have saved you about three hours of head banging. :-)

By: Luke H

Luke H — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 05:36:51 +0000

does this still work in PIAF 1755 (purple/ast 1.8) because I spent about 6 hours on it today and couldn't get it to work. ack! [WM: Head to the forums if you're having problems. Haven't tried it with Asterisk 1.8.]

By: Javier

Javier — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 15:21:29 +0000

I have a lot of core files, can i delete them?

By: Bruce

Bruce — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 04:20:58 +0000

mpg123 is missing from Trixbox version 2.0 too. I wish someone updated the files on nerdvittles continuously…

[WM: me too.]

By: mcdice

mcdice — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 22:05:29 +0000

Seems like mpg123 is missing from trixbox 2.1 and it’s not available in the yum repository either. (yum search mpg123 yields nada).

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 07 May 2006 18:34:59 +0000

Hi Ward,

First off, great job on everything! Thanks so much! When you have have chance could you update the streaming instructions for FreePBX 2.1? I’m running 2.1beta3 and it seems the file stucture for musiconhold.conf has changed and I can’t seem to figure out how to implement streaming with it.

Thanks again for all the hard work!

Tom

By: David

David — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 02:55:12 +0000

After searching here and on the forums, I think the main problem many people have when they encounter the starting moh, stopped music on hold error is that they are using an invalid url. The addresses with shoutcast in it did not work. Use my comment above to get the right address in winamp. Kershoc’s url did work for me which tipped me off to this – thanks Kershoc!

By: SJ ILAGAN

SJ ILAGAN — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 15:05:05 +0000

I finally got streaming music on hold to work reliably by doing the following (YMMV):

1) I was getting hit and miss results using the stock mgp123 for some reason. I decided to try a gpl’d version of mpg123 (v.59r-gpl) on Sourceforge.net at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=135704 . Works fine with Asterisk 1.2.x. Again, this step may not be necessary but if you are having problems with listening to the feed from a CLI command in Linux, you may want to try to upgrade.

2) I also found that many of the shoutcast.com streams don’t play well with mgp123. They did work well with Winamp and XMSS…to me anyways, mpg123 is the app actually doing the streaming in Asterisk so unless it works well from there, don’t count on your results from Winamp/XMMS. I found that icecast streams work very reliably with mpg123. If you are still having problems, make sure you test the stream out from the command line using the mpg123 command (of course, you have sound working on your asterisk box or have access to a linux box with sound).

Here are a list of streams from my musiconhold.conf file that I found to work well:

;Chicago Public Radio – Live mp3 feed
default => quietmp3:/var/lib/asterisk/mohmp3/stream,http://wbez-sclo.streamguys.us/

;Radio Revolucion
;default => quietmp3:/var/lib/asterisk/mohmp3/stream,http://www.icecastone.com:8000/revolucionradio

;FredSwing – Swing Music
;default => quietmp3:/var/lib/asterisk/mohmp3/stream,http://24.38.34.98:8100/listen

; Clarkson Univ Radio (low-bandwidth, 16kbps) default
;default => quietmp3:/var/lib/asterisk/mohmp3/stream,http://128.153.196.35:8000/live-dialup

;wls-am stream
;default => quietmp3:/var/lib/asterisk/mohmp3/stream,http://abcrad.ic.llnwd.net/stream/abcrad_wls_lo

;The Big MG
;default => quietmp3:/var/lib/asterisk/mohmp3/stream,http://stream.nonstopdvr.co.uk:8000/thebigmg_low

Hope this helps,

—
SJ Ilagan
Chicago, IL

By: David

David — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 00:43:25 +0000

Easy way I found shoutcast urls was to play the station on winamp. Then select view, media library. There should be a filename column to the right. Cut and paste that in. Some urls didn’t have a / at the end. When I included this, it would work where without the slash, it did not work.

I could not reproduce my error from above post as today it worked with either name default or stream, so I remain baffled. I did not need to change the user, but stayed logged in as the root user.

Hope this helps.

By: David

David — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 14:58:29 +0000

I noticed an interesting glitch. On a fresh vmware install I got the streaming moh to work only if I set my default moh to the radio stream, and dialed 466 to hear the default! If I switched my radio stream back to your above instructions using a different name (ie stream), it did not work. Then I switched it back to default moh and it worked again. I did this about 6 times, finally breaking my moh for some reason.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 20:07:39 +0000

I’m having the exact same problem as Rob. I have tried Kershoc’s stream, as well as a few others from Shoutcast. The streams play great on desktop boxes in our net. But we just get tons of core.* files.

[WM: See #5.]

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 06:48:39 +0000

Sorry for not reading first. Yeah, it seems like there are a few of us with the same problem. It can’t be b/w because I am at the end of a 10mb pipe. On the desktop the streams play perfectly.

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 06:45:15 +0000

I have a brand new installation of a@h and just tried to set this up. After doing so, I found some core dump files in the stream directory.
Below is asterisk’s output. mpg123 is the right version. Also other moh classes do play fine.
— Executing WaitMusicOnHold("SIP/100-16b4″, "300″) in new stack
— Started music on hold, class ‘stream’, on channel ‘SIP/100-16b4’
— Stopped music on hold on SIP/100-16b4

Any ideas?

By: Eric

Eric — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 21:11:45 +0000

For those that need to know if their station broad casts streams there is a web site http://www.web-radio.fm/st_list.cfm. Then click on their state and a list of all radio stations then break down by city.
Is it possible to use .ram format instead of .pls? How?

By: Kershoc

Kershoc — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 04:34:09 +0000

Awesome article. I had been trying for sometime, without luck, to get streaming audio working for the music on hold. It wasn’t until I read your article and caught the line about "anything above 24K mono is wasted on telephone", that I thought to try a lower bitrate stream. I run my own online radio station and was trying to get my main 64K stream working, until I read this. I also run a 24K mono rebroadcast of my main stream for dial-up users, which turns out is perfect for streaming music on hold. I plugged my url in http://www.wayoutthere.net:7010/ for the 24K stream, and things worked great. Anyone having trouble getting their streaming to work, is welcome to try my station for testing. And if you like the music, feel free to leave us tuned in.

By: Adam Jacobs

Adam Jacobs — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 19:58:31 +0000

I have a similar problem as Rob above – help! 🙂

[WM: Delete the core files and try again. There’s something wrong with your stream, i.e. usually means you don’t have enough pipe to support the type of stream requested. Or it could be that the streaming source is overloaded and not providing a stream with sufficient horsepower to get and keep the cache loaded. As noted in the article, use a desktop PC to find a stream that is rock-solid reliable before trying to use it with Asterisk.]

By: Bruce

Bruce — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 19:59:30 +0000

Free Directory Assistance – based on this line I should be able to dial 411 and it would connect me to the Directory Assistance, is this correct??

exten => 411,1,Dial(IAX2/goiax/18004116387) ; GoIAX Free Call

Thanks!!

[WM: Assuming you have a free account set up with GoIAX and you have configured a trunk for GoIAX, the answer is yes.]

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 17:50:20 +0000

Hey guys!!! First off GREAT ARTICLES!!!! They are amazing, and really help out a TON!!

That being said, I’m having trouble with the streaming music on hold, and not quite sure why. I believe I have followed the article to a T, I’ve created a DIR:
/var/lib/asterisk/mohmp3/stream and touched stream.mp3 ( it is a 0 byte file )

Now, also in the stream DIR, I have quite a few .core files, I assume these are from the stream?
drwxrwxr-x 2 asterisk asterisk 4096 Jan 2 11:51 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 asterisk asterisk 4096 Jan 2 09:57 ..
-rw——- 1 asterisk asterisk 376832 Jan 2 11:43 core.3369
-rw——- 1 asterisk asterisk 196608 Jan 2 11:43 core.3370
-rw——- 1 asterisk asterisk 376832 Jan 2 11:44 core.3474
-rw——- 1 asterisk asterisk 376832 Jan 2 11:44 core.3476
-rw——- 1 asterisk asterisk 376832 Jan 2 11:45 core.3492
-rw——- 1 asterisk asterisk 376832 Jan 2 11:47 core.3516
-rw——- 1 asterisk asterisk 376832 Jan 2 11:48 core.3522
-rw——- 1 asterisk asterisk 196608 Jan 2 11:51 core.3762
-rw-r–r– 1 asterisk asterisk 0 Jan 2 11:42 stream.mp3

but, whenever I try to get a stream going, the console in asterisk outputs this, and nothing ever plays:

— Started music on hold, class ‘default’, on channel ‘SIP/1000-09d2’
— Stopped music on hold on SIP/1000-09d2

Here is my musiconhold.conf file:

[classes]
;default => quietmp3:/var/lib/asterisk/mohmp3
default => /var/lib/asterisk/mohmp3/stream,http://www.shoutcast.com/sbin/shoutcast-playlist.pls?rn=5048&file=filename.pls
;loud => mp3:/var/lib/asterisk/mohmp3
;random => quietmp3:/var/lib/asterisk/mohmp3,-z
#include musiconhold_additional.conf

Can anyone please tell me what I am missing? Thanks so much again.

Rob

By: Jeff Glassman

Jeff Glassman — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 22:38:19 +0000

I am having trouble finding the path of the straming audio. I am trying to use http://www.shoutcast.com/.

I can not find anything like this
http://www.shoutcast.com/sbin/shoutcast-playlist.pls?rn=3281&file=filename.pls

[WM: Ctrl-Click or Right-Click on one of the TuneIn buttons beside a station and then choose copy link.]

By: Derek

Derek — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 12:54:02 +0000

Would it be possible to to configure music on hold to get its feed from the soundcard input line on the inbuilt soundcard in my asterisk server. That way I could connect up the CDPlayer from my old PBX.