How to add another track to a Music On Hold class

A VICIdial Music on hold class can hold as many tracks as you want, and you build a richer hold experience by adding more files to it. Maybe you started with a single song and now want a spoken greeting in front of it, or you want to rotate two or three songs instead of looping one. The catch is that you cannot upload directly into the class - a file has to live in the audio store first, then you attach it. Skip the first half and the attach step has nothing to pick from. This walkthrough covers both halves so a new track actually plays.

Step 1: get the file into the audio store

VICIdial only plays audio that exists in its audio store, so upload your new track there first. The audio store is the central library every VICIdial server in a cluster pulls from, which is why files have to land there before any class can use them. The file must be a PCM mono 16-bit 8kHz WAV or an 8-bit 8kHz GSM file - those are the only two formats the store accepts. Anything else gets rejected or simply refuses to play once attached, and that is the most common reason a newly added track stays silent. If you have not uploaded a prompt before, how to upload an audio prompt in VICIdial walks through the upload screen step by step.

Step 2: attach the file to the class

1. Go to admin, Music On Hold, and click MODIFY on the class you want to grow.
2. Find the Add An Audio File control in the Audio Files section.
3. Select your new file from the list of audio-store files and submit. It now shows in the class's file list.
4. Set its Rank with the pulldown so it falls where you want in the play order.
5. Wait up to a minute for VICIdial to regenerate the hold-music config so the new track goes live.

The full path of a new track

It helps to see the whole journey from file to caller's ear:

flowchart TD
  A[Format file to 8kHz] --> B[Upload to audio store]
  B --> C{Validated OK}
  C -- No --> A
  C -- Yes --> D[Open MOH class MODIFY]
  D --> E[Add An Audio File]
  E --> F[Set Rank]
  F --> G[Wait for conf rebuild]
  G --> H[Caller hears new track]

Once the track is attached and ranked, it plays to held callers as One-way audio through Asterisk - the caller hears it but is not heard, which is exactly what hold audio should be. The same class can serve more than one queue, so a track you add once can reach every Ingroup that points at the class. That makes the audio store plus a shared class an efficient way to update hold music everywhere at once: add the file in one place and every queue using that class picks it up on the next rebuild.

Adding tracks is part of running VICIdial's audio system well. For the wider view of prompts, voicemail, and TTS (text to speech), read our VICIdial audio prompts, voicemail, and TTS guide.

VICIfast gives you a dialer with the audio store and Music On Hold ready, so adding a track is a quick upload and attach. See our pricing to get started.