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Music on hold 1

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Moto2xs

Programmer
Jan 24, 2006
16
US
Has any one had customers complainning about the quality of the music on hold? We have a customer that says the music on hold is breaking up and static sounding. I tested it out on a lan phone and works fine no isues. I called back on my Sprint cell phone and it breaks up and you can't really hear the music.Tested this on a few site with different music players. They all do it on my cell. Even a site with a specific musc on hold player. Just wondering if anyone has had complaints about this and what they tried.
 
thats funny, i am actually having the same problem right now with our system at the office. it has just been happening the last couple of days. I personally think its a cell phone issue. a partner thinks may be it is a trunk port issue. we havent tried it from a lan phone outside of the office. i will test a little later and let you know what happens.
 
I think it has to do with the Cell phone also. I tried with another cell phone Cingular and it still did it but not as bad. It would not make sence if it was a trunk port because I tested it on 5 different sites. Same result on all of them.
 
i just tried it from a cell phone and a lan line and both of them were bad. i have a pri coming into our system, what about you???
 
There could be some reasons for that:

1. A bad connector.
2. Disturbance on the wire (GSM and TDMA phones create lots of noise on unshielded lines, there might be one phone near the IPO).
3. The IPO socket has gotten loose.
4. The IPO is faulty.

Try loading a WAV file through Manager - Disconnect the MOH source, put a WAV file up to 30 seconds in a mono, 16 bit 8000KHz format in Manager's directory, reboot the IPO and check the tftp log to see that the IPO got the file. After it got it, try listening to the MOH, if it sounds good it means that #4 is not your answer.
 
When we instaled this one site we started out with the wav file on the server set up mono,16 bit 8000KHz format in Manager's directory. That was the first thing we changed to fix this issue. We thought since this site is connected to a remote site through IP Trunking we thoought it was no playing clear. So we changed to MOH players. But no matter what we have tried still have this issue.Thanks for the info Kavsagol. I will have to check the connection. But once again I get this on 5 differnt site, not just the one.
 
Do you get the problem on 5 different IPOs or on one IPO connected to other 5 sites?

You have to make some tests to pin point the problem:
- Try listening to MOH from a local digital or analog phone.
- Try listening to it by calling to trunks connected to the IPO from a land line (or call the IPO from a local extension through an outside line).
- Try listening to it from a remote digital or analog phone.
- Try listening to it from a remote trunk by using a land line.

The problem could be because of different codecs between the IPOs, making them encode, decode and then encode and decode again.

 
This issue started with one site. So I tried it on 5 differnt IP Office's and the porblem seems to be the asme through all 5 but no one else has complained. Just this one site has.
 
ok, our MOH still sounds bad...

from a local phone- good
from any outside phone(cell or land line)- bad

i believe it is the IPO unit or the PRI card, but how can i prove it to my distributer?
 
The only way you can prove this is the PRI card is by changing the PRI line to another provider. Maybe it is a matter of configuration for the PRI line.

If you have VM Pro try playing some speach files and some music files through it on outside line and see if it sounds bad.
 
My experience is that ALL music-on-hold on ALL systems sounds bad via cell phone. If it sounds OK via land-line, there is likely nothing wrong with your system.
Mike
 
That exactly it. It is bad from a land line. The voicemail pro sounds great, no skips or anything. That's why this one is really bugging me.it is just the moh that sounds bad from any outside line.
 
I have experience with lots of IPOs and none of them have bad sound quality when you hear MOH from cell phones or land lines. Most of the IPOs we installed are 406s, a little bit of SOEs and 412s. We do not install 3.2 on any system, so there might be a problem I am not aware of with that version.

From what you're telling me, considering that sound coming from VM Pro is of good quality, this looks like a faulty unit. I'd consider a CPU overload if it was only from the stored file, but since it is also from an external source it looks like something's wrong with the unit itself.
 
See we have installed alot of IP Office's 403's and 406's and even some 412's. I tried on a couple 406's and evenn one 412 that we installed and they all sounded bad on a cell phone. we are running 3.2 on all of them maybe there is a issue with 3.2 and music on hold. Some of the units have wav files and some have a cd player hooked up and one has a music on hold device. They all sound bad on cell phone. But from a land line they are good.
 
It could be something local to your area or country. In my IVR days I was working allot with sound files and sound file formats, and I've found that conversion between frequencies can cause poor sound quality. It is possible that the cellular carriers use a frequency that doesn't convert well from 8KHz.
 
We have the same problem which is identical to Moto2xs. Strangely, both of us are not even on the same type of phone system (we use Altigen with a CD hook-up for on-hold music).
So it safe to say that the cell phone is our common culprit.
 
After further research, I'm convinced that the source of the MoH break up & static issue is from the cell phone itself.

Almost all cell phones nowaday are digital. To conserve bandwidth, cell phone companies use signal processing algorithms for "silence detection". But this really mess up the quiet parts of the music, resulting in a bunch of static.

This leaded me on a quest to find a music format that is "digital cell phone friendly". After some trial & error, I found "Instrumental Jazz & Blues" is one of the best. Though I haven't tried the Tibetan Monk Chanting yet ;-)
 
but that still doesnt solve my problem. It sounds bad from a land line at my office. i have ruled out the music on hold device. i believe it is a 3.2 problem.
 
Try changing the music source. We had someone that had an ipod that sounded bad on moh. Turns out they had the equalizer settings all messed up on the ipod and it caused some issues.
 
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