The problem: you get error messages from Asterisk when it tries to play a sound file:
Sep 22 09:23:59 WARNING[25263] file.c: File agent-pass does not exist in any format
Sep 22 09:23:59 WARNING[25263] file.c: Unable to open agent-pass (format ulaw): No such file or directory
But you can see the file there in /usr/share/asterisk/sounds (or similar location).
First, open an Asterisk console and do ‘show file formats’:
devonian*CLI> show file formats
Format Name Extensions
slin wav wav
adpcm vox vox
slin sln sln|raw
gsm wav49 WAV|wav49
ulaw pcm pcm|ulaw|ul|mu
alaw alaw alaw|al
ilbc iLBC ilbc
h263 h263 h263
gsm gsm gsm
g729 g729 g729
g726 g726-16 g726-16
g726 g726-24 g726-24
g726 g726-32 g726-32
g726 g726-40 g726-40
g723 g723sf g723|g723sf
ulaw au au
slin ogg_vorbis ogg
17 file formats registered.
That’ll show the formats available and the file extensions they should have. Check your file exists and with the right extension.
Next, see whether your translation has been activated. Asterisk needs to translate the audio between the stored format and the format it sends out over the VOIP connection. It’s best to transcode your recording into the VOIP format so Asterisk doesn’t have to do it in real time. To see the active translations, do:
devonian*CLI> show translation
Translation times between formats (in milliseconds)
Source Format (Rows) Destination Format(Columns)
g723 gsm ulaw alaw g726 adpcm slin lpc10 g729 speex ilbc
g723 - - - - - - - - - - -
gsm - - 52 52 92 54 51 14628 - 64027 -
ulaw - 12442 - 1 45 7 4 14581 - 63980 -
alaw - 12442 2 - 45 7 4 14581 - 63980 -
g726 - 12472 35 35 - 37 34 14611 - 64010 -
adpcm - 12442 5 5 45 - 4 14581 - 63980 -
slin - 12438 1 1 41 3 - 14577 - 63976 -
lpc10 - 28229 15792 15792 15832 15794 15791 - - 79767 -
g729 - - - - - - - - - - -
speex - 27150 14713 14713 14753 14715 14712 29289 - - -
ilbc - - - - - - - - - - -
This shows the codecs available and their performance. ‘devonian’ is a slow wireless router, which is why many codecs take much longer than realtime to transcode.
Is this list sparsely populated? Are you running on slow hardware? Have you just (re)started Asterisk? In which case you might run into an artifact of the way Asterisk starts up its codecs.
Asterisk computes the above table by running transcoding tests for each entry in the table when it starts up. If you’re on slow hardware, these tests may take several minutes (the lpc10 to speex test above took 79 seconds). While the tests are going on, the codec isn’t available for use by Asterisk. If you try to play a recording while the test is going on it may declare there’s no sound file available, because the codec hasn’t been initialised yet. For example, in this situation I see:
devonian*CLI> show file formats
Format Name Extensions
slin ogg_vorbis ogg
1 file format registered.
In this state it can’t play anything other than ogg. Asterisk will still work, but will give the error on playing any audio files that aren’t ogg.
The situation can be much improved by disabling some codecs. For example, to disable speex and lpc10 do this in modules.conf:
noload => codec_speex.so
noload => codec_lpc10.so
You should see the startup time much improved.
July 26, 2017
Phone System 