Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, 2nd Edition

Installing Additional Prompts

Additional prompts are installed via the menuselect application in your Asterisk source directory. There are three sets of audio packages: Core Sound, Extra Sound, and Music On Hold File. Each set of packages is broken down into different formats (and the Core Sound packages are available in multiple languages). Using the menuselect application, you can select combinations of audio packages for use in your environment. Some of the formats available include:

• WAV

• μlaw

• alaw

• GSM

• G.729

• G.722 (wideband, 16-bit)

As of this writing, the Core Sound packages are available in the following languages:

• English

• Spanish

• French

Warning

Selecting any sounds in menuselect will cause the system to download the files from the Digium FTP server upon install. The size of these files ranges anywhere from 2 MB to 27 MB, so be aware of this when installing offline, or on slow and expensive links.

Other Useful Add-ons

The asterisk-addons package contains code to allow the storage of Call Detail Records (CDRs) to a MySQL database. There is also code that allows Asterisk to natively play MP3s (which we don’t recommend unless you have a powerful system with very few phones on it). Some folks may also be interested in the interpreter that allows you to load Perl code into memory for the life of an Asterisk process (which can be very helpful if you have a large number of AGI calls to the Perl interpreter). Programs are placed into asterisk-addons when there are licensing issues preventing them ...