Replace the Default VICIdial Hold Music

How to swap the stock VICIdial hold music for your own audio — by editing the default entry or pointing campaigns at a new Music On Hold class.

Every fresh VICIdial box ships with stock Music on hold — generic clips that came with the install. It works, but it is not yours. Replacing it is a common first-week task, and there are two clean ways to do it: edit the default entry in place, or build a new class and point your traffic at it. Both leave you with branded hold audio.

Option one: edit the default entry

The fastest swap is to edit the existing default entry. Open the Show MOH Entries list, click MODIFY on the default, delete the stock clips with the DELETE link next to each, then add your own files through the Add An Audio File selector. Your clips have to be in the audio store first. Because everything already pointing at the default keeps pointing at it, the swap reaches every Campaign and queue at once.

Editing the default changes hold music everywhere that uses it in one move. That is efficient, but make sure you actually want a system-wide change before you delete the stock clips.

Option two: build a new class and repoint

If you want different hold music per campaign — say one tone for sales and another for support — create a new entry instead of touching the default. Add a fresh Music on hold entry with a numeric ID, attach your clips, then change the hold setting on the campaign or Ingroup to point at the new class. The default stays intact as a fallback. Our walkthrough on setting up the audio store covers getting the clips ready beforehand.

Here is how the two routes diverge once you have your files in the audio store:

flowchart TD
  A[Custom clips in audio store] --> B{Replace everywhere?}
  B -->|Yes| C[Modify default entry]
  C --> D[Delete stock clips]
  D --> E[Add custom clips]
  B -->|No| F[Create new MOH entry]
  F --> G[Add custom clips]
  G --> H[Point campaign at new class]
  E --> I[Update runs once a minute]
  H --> I
  I --> J[Callers hear new hold music]

Watch the format and the timing

The replacement clips must match the Recording format (WAV/MP3) the Asterisk box expects — PCM mono 16-bit 8k WAV or 8-bit 8k GSM — or the audio store rejects them on upload. If you grabbed a track off the web, convert it first; our guide on converting audio for VICIdial has the settings.

Never delete the stock files by hand on disk to force a replacement. The update cycle deletes any file in the music on hold folder that is not listed in an entry — manage everything through the entry instead, and let the once-a-minute update apply it.

After you save either way, wait a minute for the config to regenerate, then place a test call into a queue and confirm the new audio plays. If it does not, the cause is almost always a format mismatch or an inactive entry, not the swap itself.

Which route should you pick

If every queue and campaign on the box should play the same branded loop, editing the default is the least fuss — one change, applied everywhere, nothing to repoint. If you run several teams that want their own sound, or you want to keep the stock default around as a safety net, build a new class and point each campaign at the one it should use. Many systems end up doing both: a branded default for the common case plus a couple of purpose-built classes for specific queues.

Whichever route you take, keep a copy of your formatted clips somewhere off the box. The audio store is the live working copy, not a backup, and a Factory reset or a rebuild will not bring your custom hold music back on its own. A folder of correctly converted files on your own machine means re-applying your branding after any rebuild is a few uploads rather than a re-conversion job from scratch.

Replacing hold music is one small part of branding the caller experience, which also spans greetings, voicemail, and TTS (text to speech). The audio prompts and voicemail guide ties it together. If you would rather start from a clean, configured dialer instead of swapping stock files, VICIfast provisions one in under 40 seconds — see pricing.