External SIP Music on Hold

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Can Asterisk forward music on hold requests to a different SIP platform?

In otherwords I don’t want to play an audio file, or capture the sound card, but send music on hold requests to a different SIP device.

Possible with Asterisk?

Thanks

2

Not that I’m aware of, no.

The mohsuggest option will suggest a class to the called party, but will then begin playing back hold music to it.

3

Thanks for the reply Malcolm. Makes it rather difficult of course to integrate with an external SIP music on hold server and negates some of the benefits of using SIP in the first place.

4

Keep in mind that when Asterisk was built, there weren’t any external SIP MoH servers, and that it’s not difficult to load music into Asterisk’s MoH feature.

5

Indeed, but that has changed and the file based MOH feature of Asterisk is rather restrictive. With my day job head on I’m looking to replace one SIP phone system with another. The former is closed source but highly compatible with 3rd party SIP vendors, the latter is open source but more restrictive (unless I want to re-write the code of course).

What would be the best forum to lobby for change?

6

The only really effective way of lobbying for change is to write and submit a patch.

7

It is likely to be a major job as Asterisk initiated REFER transactions are somewhat flakey in the standard code.

I’d note that our customers seem to give a very low priority to MoH and have actually asked to have silence used for idle agents.