How to add a Music On Hold class in VICIdial

A Music on hold class is the named bundle of audio that VICIdial plays to a waiting caller. Before you can point a campaign or queue at hold music, you have to create the entry. The add screen is short on purpose — it asks for just enough to make a valid record, then lets you fill in the rest after you save.

Open the add screen

From the admin area, click the Music On Hold link to see the existing list, then click ADD A NEW MOH ENTRY on the left-side menu. You will get a form with three fields: the ID, the name, and a place to begin. That is all you need to create a record that the dialplan and Asterisk will recognize.

Fill in the required fields

Two fields are mandatory, and the form will reject the submission if either is blank:

• Music On Hold ID — the short unique identifier. Use numbers only: no spaces and no punctuation. It can run from 2 to 100 characters.
• Music On Hold Name — a longer, descriptive label, 2 to 255 characters. This shows up as a comment in the generated config so you can tell entries apart later.

What gets built when you save

Once you submit, the entry exists and the full modify screen opens with the rest of the options. From there you set whether the class is active, whether files play in random order, and which audio files belong to it. Here is the flow from clicking add to a class the dialer will actually use:

flowchart TD
  A[Click ADD A NEW MOH ENTRY] --> B[Enter numeric ID]
  B --> C[Enter descriptive name]
  C --> D{Both fields set?}
  D -->|No| E[Form rejects submit]
  D -->|Yes| F[Record saved]
  F --> G[Modify screen opens]
  G --> H[Set active and order]
  H --> I[Add audio file]
  I --> J[Class ready for campaign]

Attach your first audio file

A class with no files plays nothing, so the next step is to add audio. The file has to be in the audio store first — you cannot attach a clip that has not been uploaded. If you have never used it, our walkthrough on setting up the VICIdial audio store covers getting clips onto the box in the right Recording format (WAV/MP3).

On the modify screen, pick the file from the Add An Audio File selector and submit. You can add several and use the Rank pulldown to set play order. Changes are picked up about once a minute, so give it a moment before testing. After that, point a Campaign or an inbound queue at the class ID and waiting callers will hear it.

Active and random order

Two more fields on the modify screen are worth setting on day one. Active controls whether the entry exists in the generated config at all — leave it on, because an inactive entry quietly drops out and the dialer falls back to the default. Random Order decides whether your clips shuffle or play in the rank order you set. For a single looping track it makes no difference, but if you have several clips and do not want callers to memorize the sequence, set random order to Y.

It is also worth confirming the entry actually plays before you wire it into live traffic. Place a test call into a queue or park a call and listen. If you hear silence, the most common causes are an inactive entry, a clip in the wrong format, or simply testing before the once-a-minute update ran. None of those mean the entry itself is broken.

That is the whole add path. For how the audio layer ties together with greetings, voicemail, and TTS (text to speech), read our audio prompts and voicemail guide. And if you would rather not hand-build any of this, VICIfast ships a configured dialer in under 40 seconds — see pricing.