Changing the audio format of call recordings

Hi,

I’m having a problem with my Asterisk setup. The calls we record are taking up a lot of space on the server; they’re saved in WAV format.

I only have two queues set up, and they’re taking up about 10GB each month.

Is there any way to reduce the size of the call recordings or switch to a smaller format?

Thanks and Regards,
Diego Gómez.

On Friday 13 June 2025 at 14:42:38, op.disashop via Asterisk Community wrote:

The calls we record are taking up a lot of space on the server; they’re
saved in WAV format.

I only have two queues set up, and they’re taking up about 10GB each month.

Have you looked at the price of 8 to 20 Tbyte disks lately?

Is there any way to reduce the size of the call recordings or switch to a
smaller format?

Converting to MP3 is a common method.

Otherwise, consider remote storage (NFS, Amazon S3, iSCSI, whatever fits your
setup).

Antony.


I just got a new mobile phone, and I called it Titanic. It’s already syncing.

Change the filename extension to one that indicates a lower bit rate codec.

I’m assuming you mean wav, not WAV, as .wav, in Asterisk, uses GSM, rather than the 16 bit, signed linear, that you get with wav, and you are not going to get anything much smaller than that, with an acceptable quality. (Microsoft .wav is a wrapper format, and can be used for many different encoding schemes, but Asterisk only uses it for two.)

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