How to delete an audio file from the Audio Store

Old prompts pile up. A retired offer, a holiday greeting from last year, a test file you uploaded once and forgot. The VICIdial Audio Store lets you clear them out, but the delete tool is deliberately blunt: you type one filename, submit, and it is gone. There is no multi-select and no undo. That makes it fast and a little unforgiving, so the real work is knowing which files are safe to remove.

The delete tool, exactly

On the Audio Store page there is a File to Delete field. Enter the file name in the text field, press submit, and the file is removed. It is one file at a time, by exact name. The store does not warn you if that file is currently in use somewhere, which is the whole reason to check first. A deleted file does not come back; you would have to re-upload it from your own copy.

Check before you delete

The one place a file can be silently load-bearing is a Music on hold entry. If a file is part of a hold class and you delete it from the store, the on-hold loop loses a track. Before you delete, confirm the file is not referenced by any MOH entry, any IVR (interactive voice response) prompt, or a recorded line a Voicemail drop depends on. Use the Audio File List to spot the exact filename, then trace where it is used.

flowchart TD
  A[Want to remove a file] --> B[Find exact name in file list]
  B --> C{In a music on hold entry?}
  C -->|Yes| D[Remove from MOH first]
  C -->|No| E{Used as a prompt?}
  E -->|Yes| F[Repoint the prompt first]
  E -->|No| G[Enter name in File to Delete]
  D --> G
  F --> G
  G --> H[Press submit file removed]

Follow the chart and you avoid the two ways a delete bites: pulling a track out from under a hold class, or yanking a prompt a live flow still points at. There is a related cleanup behavior worth knowing: any file present in a music on hold folder but not listed in that MOH entry gets removed automatically on the next update. So the store and the MOH list stay in sync without you babysitting them. The flip side is that removing a file from an MOH entry, not just the store, is what actually stops it playing on hold, since the hold loop is rebuilt from the entry's list, not from whatever happens to be in the folder.

Steps to delete

1. Open the Audio File List and copy the exact filename you want gone.
2. Confirm nothing in use references it.
3. Paste the name into File to Delete and press submit.

It is worth building a habit around this. Before any delete, sort the file list, find the exact name, and ask yourself the two questions from the chart: is it in a hold class, and is it pointed at by a live flow? If both answers are no, it is safe. If either is yes, fix the reference first. The whole check takes under a minute and saves you from the kind of outage that only shows up when a caller hits a broken prompt.

If you are not sure what the store is for in the first place, what the VICIdial Audio Store is gives you the ground floor, and the audio prompts and voicemail guide shows how a single file ripples across a Campaign.

Housekeeping is a chore on any system you run yourself. VICIfast ships the dialer configured and ready, so a clean store is one less thing to set up. See /pricing for plans.