Overhead paging and music

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

hey everyone
currently i have an overhead paging system that somebody put in long before my time that we still are using, however i would like to eventually replace it with my new phone system.

what i want is kinda complex and i cant seem to figure out a way to get everything working the way i want.

i have setup my dialplan to change the music on hold genre based on dates, such as Christmas music at Christmas time, etc… i would like to use the hold music as my overhead music and be able to have overhead paging that mutes the music, does the page, and then un-mutes the music again. that all seems easy to do (two line phone connected to PA amp, one line music, other line for page set to auto answer) except that i also have a CD player/radio that we want to use occasionally too. I can hook the CD/radio directly to the amp, however then it will not mute if a page comes in. The only way i can think to do this is send the CD/radio on the line in on a sound card (very difficult seeing as PA is in a different building than my asterisk server(means another computer)) and then switch based on dates for music, and pull CD/radio during non-special times. However, that would be all based on dates and not easily over-ridden if a special event occurs and we want to play a CD, and its set to use the mp3’s in the MOH directory. It also needs to be easy for non-tech people to switch… :confused: :confused:

What i said above seems to complicated to anyone to be able to figure out as well as inefficient.

Does anybody first understand that, and second have any ideas on how to go about doing this??

Thanks
-Eric

2

I think your easiest solution would be to get a PA that does automatic muting. We have a PA-4000 from Inter-M and this has a special telephone input that will mute all the other channels. They also do them with inbuilt radios and cassette players.

3

I don’t know if these are obtainable where you are, but look at http://www.cloud.co.uk/
Look at the Matrix 4, they seem excellent.
They are brilliant zone mixers with self muting pa inputs. Your users could select from a range of music sources with a remote panel and announcements would always get through.
As for the automation, I would personally just change the cd’s as needed.

Mike.

4

here is info on paging
voip-info.org/wiki/view/Sett … sound+card

and here is someone on MOH
voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+ … nhold.conf

hope that helps