How to set the play order of hold-music tracks

If your VICIdial Music on hold class holds more than one track — say a short greeting followed by two songs — you usually care about the order they play in. VICIdial gives every file in a class a Rank, and the Rank is what controls the sequence. This walkthrough shows how to set that order so callers hear your files exactly the way you intend.

Where the order lives

Open the admin area, go to Music On Hold, and click MODIFY on the class you want to edit. Scroll to the Audio Files section. Every file already attached to the class shows there, each with a Rank pulldown next to it. The Rank pulldown is the control — change a file's Rank and you change where it falls in the playback sequence.

One thing to confirm first: the Random Order setting on the same screen must be set to N for the order to be honored. If Random Order is Y, Asterisk shuffles the files and ignores your Rank entirely, so reordering does nothing audible.

Setting the Rank

1. On the Modify Music On Hold screen, find the Audio Files list.
2. Use the Rank pulldown next to each file to give it a position — Rank 1 plays first, Rank 2 next, and so on.
3. Submit the change. VICIdial saves the new order to the class.
4. Wait up to a minute. VICIdial rewrites the hold-music config once per minute when there are changes, so the new order takes effect shortly after you save.

How the order is chosen at play time

When a caller lands on hold, Asterisk looks at the class and walks the files in Rank order, then loops back to the top:

flowchart TD
  A[Caller on hold] --> B[Read class file list]
  B --> C[Sort files by Rank]
  C --> D[Play Rank 1]
  D --> E[Play Rank 2]
  E --> F[Play Rank 3]
  F --> G{More files}
  G -- Yes --> H[Play next Rank]
  G -- No --> I[Loop back to Rank 1]
  H --> G

This is why Rank matters for messaging. A common pattern is to put a one-time greeting at Rank 1 and music at Rank 2 and beyond. Because the list loops, the greeting repeats on each cycle, so keep it short. The audio plays as One-way audio to the caller, and the same class can be reused across a Campaign or an Ingroup, so a single ordered playlist can serve many queues.

Before you reorder, check the files

Every track you rank has to already be in the audio store and in a valid 8kHz format. If a file is the wrong sample rate or codec, it will not play no matter where you rank it. If you are unsure your files are right, read VICIdial audio store file formats before you build the class.

Play order is one piece of VICIdial's larger audio system. For prompts, voicemail, TTS (text to speech), and the rest, see our VICIdial audio prompts, voicemail, and TTS guide.

VICIfast hands you a dialer with the audio store and Music On Hold wired up, so ranking your tracks is the only step left. See our pricing to get started.