Recording Greetings

[jrairden]

Hello,

I'm getting ready to update our menu greetings for our IP office phone system. Our current greeting wav's are approximately 800 Kb each, which were recorded through a phone. The quality is ok, but we want to get a bit higher quality. I ended up having the 'company voice' come over and record through a mixer/microphone. The wav's are now 4 times as large. My question, will the phone system handle wav's that size for large amounts of incoming calls? Do i need compress the file size to get closer to 800 kb? How does the phone system pull these files as calls come in?

Thanks,

Justin

 

[BobNukem]

WAV files can be recorded in a wide variety of sampling rates, encoding bits and channels (mono/stereo). The IP office requires the files to be 8,000 Hz sampling rate (frequency), 16 bit encoding and 1 channel. Files with different setting rates will confuse the IP Office and they will not play back properly.

Your professionally recorded WAV files are probably done with high quality setting which make the files much larger as you have noticed. Media players will play different WAV file formats correctly but the IP Office will not.

You can find programs that will reformat WAV files for you but I have found several programs that do it incorrectly. The one program that does do it correctly is dBpowerAmp. I am sure there are others as well.

 

[jrairden]

so if i change the frequency and encoding, will a larger file size matter? or by doing that, will it lower the size?

thanks for your help

 

[phaseburn]

By reencoding it, you will reduce the file size. It will not be exactly the same as the prior file, but it will play back fine at the newer size so long as the encoding is correct.

I've also found that Winamp using the wavewriter plugin can export .wav files from mp3 and wav files at higher bitrates that are compatible with the phone system.