I have two questions related to poor sound quality, and have not been able to find a posting that deals with my particular situation. Currently I am strictly using a VoIP configuration with softphones only (until I get everything working to my satisfaction). I am also connected to my ITSP by an IAX ‘trunk’. Also, I am almost exclusively using open source software at this point, in order to understand any associated limitations.
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I am using the X-Lite softphone and when I call people they are hearing a good deal of noice on the line, as well as the occaisional ‘clipping’ of my voice. I used the Audio Turning Wizard as part of the X-Lite softphone in order to ‘train’ the system and remove the background noice, but that does not appear to have had any affect. What am I missing?
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I am trying to upload WAV files to my PBX, via the AMP (for convenience). They are my own recordings that were made with Audacity, creating an MP3 file. I then converted them to WAV using LAME. This was all done on my Windows PC - from which I am accessing the AMP. Asterisk doesn’t seem to recognize the WAV file since I am not able to here anything when I try to play the recording back from within Asterisk. I can’t believe that the WAV files generated from within Windows, would not be compatible with a Linux system. Is that the case, or am I missing something else?
There could be a lot of reasons for the noise from your softphone depending on the computer it is running on, your headphones/mic, etc. But bottom line, at least on the Xlite that I use occaisionally, it is far inferior to a decent real IP phone (the best option) or a decent ATA (the second best option). You are not going to get a good assessment with just this route.
As far as the wav file, it needs to be in the right format. I don’t recall off hand which that is other than I’m pretty sure most default Windows formats are not. Do some googling and I’m sure you’ll come up with the right format, if someone else doesn’t beet you to it by posting the answer here.
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Thanks. Just a bit of an update … I downloaded Idefisk (supports IAX). It sounds significantly better than what I experienced with X-Lite. The background noise is much reduced, although there is a still a fair bit of clipping. I would love to know if others have a similar issue with clipping (it is not bad, but people know that I am on a VoIP set when I call them). It should not be a bandwidth issue - although I am close on the uplink.
Regarding the WAV format requirements. You are right; I have discovered that not just anything will do here. I am stilling working thru this one, and will provide an update once I have completely solved it. If anyone could save me the trouble with some of their insights here, I would still appreciate it.
use wavepad url=http://www.nch.com.au/wavepad/masters.html[/url] to convert audio files to wav - you’ll want to select the 8KHz, 16bit format for use with asterisk.