Unwanted pause/delay between dialplan elements

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Hi Folks,
when I implement a simple dialplan e.g. like that below, I get very long pause times between two steps / commands within the dialplan.

For example:
[jondoe]
exten => 123,1,Answer()
exten => 123,2,MP3Player(1.mp3)
exten => 123,3,MP3Player(2.mp3)
exten => 123,4,Hangup

I get about 2 seconds of pause time after 1.mp3 has finished. I made sure, that there is no silence at the end of the first file.
I need the next MP3Player() to start as soon as possible after the first one ends.
Do you have ideas where this unwanted waiting time comes from?

Thanks for your help!
Cheers bignose

2

It’s up to the application itself to return, after which the next step is executed. It is possible that MP3Player for some reason is introducing that delay.

3

MP3Player shells out to an external command, so you have the cost of launching an instance of a Linux shell and then an instance of the actual player application.

In a normal telephony environment, MP3 offers no quality advantage at all, but is greedy in terms of CPU. You shouldn’t be using MP3 for original content and, for other content, you should pre-transcode it, if at all possible.

4

Thanks for your replies!
I’ll check how I can optimize an external app’s return time. :wink:
Thanks
bignose