Dial() with Limit plays sounds to caller THEN callee, why?

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Hi guys

I have a feature request - even though its sort of a bug I think - please let me know which or if there is a better place to post this. The Dial() app will not play sound warnings or start sounds to both the caller and the callee at the same time if it is set to play to both. It plays them in order while putting one of them into pure silence as it does so. For a long message it looks as though the call has hungup.

So with the Dial() app you use the time limit and decide you want to play a 30 second start sound and also a 10 second warning sound file on the desired lengths of the call. You want both the caller and callee to hear this naturally.

All great! But hold on! It will actually put the callee into silence without warning while it goes off and plays the start sound file to the caller first - then worse yet - once done it will play the same sound file to the callee putting the caller into silence while it does it. Unless the caller knows what is going on they will think the call has hung up.

Then with the warning message same thing - you could be talking away while you are in silence without knowing - while the caller is hearing the warning sound file. When they come back there is no warning to the callee so it is totally confusing. Even a beep or something would help here - even though it should play to both at the same time if you requested that both should hear it - or one of them should go into music on hold or something.

This makes no sense at all to me - I cant for the life of me think why silence without warning would be of any use to anybody? Even if we can’t for some reason play the files at the same time to both caller and callee can we not at least put the callee on hold with music so they don’t think the call is dead? Also they have no idea when the call actually starts as it goes from silence to the caller who is listening to this boring legal price warning (in my case) message and will be silent themselves. So without even a beep or something to warn them that the call is actually bridged they have no idea.

Would it be possible to do any of these:

  1. Create an option to allow the callee to go onto music on hold while the caller is listening to the start_sound message if they have Set(LIMIT_PLAYAUDIO_CALLEE=no) so something like Set(LIMIT_PLAY_MOH_TO_CALLEE=yes)
  2. If they have Set(LIMIT_PLAYAUDIO_CALLEE=yes) can we then have the sound file played at the same time? having it played once to the caller while the callee is put into silence makes no sense :smile: it needs to be at the same time. And if for some reason it cant be can we then have music on hold or a beep or something to warn the callee that the caller has finished listening to the sound file and they can actually talk to each other :smile:

Thanks guys! You’re all totally awesome!
David

2

Feature requests may be noted here, but a better place is the developers’ mailing list.

The reason it does this is almost certainly because it would need to start and coordinate a second thread to play the sounds in parallel. The silence is probably the result of running “autoservice” on the channel, which is a mechanism it uses when it needs to concentrate on another channel, in particular when running blocking code on the other channel.