How to upload your own hold music to VICIdial

Getting your own clip to play as Music on hold in VICIdial is a two-part job: get the file onto the box in the right format, then attach it to a hold entry. People often skip straight to the entry and wonder why nothing plays — the file has to live in the audio store first. This walks the whole path.

Format the clip first

The audio store accepts only two formats, and hold music is no exception. Your file must be one of:

• WAV that is PCM mono, 16-bit, 8000 Hz (one channel, uncompressed).
• GSM that is 8-bit, 8000 Hz.

Most music you download is stereo 44.1k, which will be rejected. Convert it down first — our guide to converting audio for VICIdial shows the exact settings, and if you are deciding between the two, the Recording format (WAV/MP3) choice between GSM and WAV is covered there too.

Push it through the audio store

In the admin area, open the Audio Store utility and upload your formatted file. After a WAV upload, the page tries to validate the format and shows a red warning if something is off — if you see that, reformat and upload again. Uploading a file with the same name replaces the older copy, which is handy when you are iterating on a clip.

The full upload path, from raw track to playing on hold, looks like this:

flowchart TD
  A[Source music file] --> B[Convert to 8k mono]
  B --> C[Open Audio Store]
  C --> D[Upload file]
  D --> E{Format valid?}
  E -->|No, red warning| B
  E -->|Yes| F[File in audio store]
  F --> G[Open MOH entry]
  G --> H[Add audio file]
  H --> I[Set rank]
  I --> J[Plays on hold]

Attach it to a hold entry

With the file in the store, open the modify screen of your Music on hold entry, pick the clip in the Add An Audio File selector, and submit. Use the Rank pulldown if you want it in a specific position. The entry update runs about once a minute, so give it a moment before testing. After that, any Campaign or queue pointed at the entry will play your clip to waiting callers.

If the broader upload flow is new to you, our walkthrough on uploading an audio prompt to VICIdial uses the same audio store and applies cleanly to hold music.

Pick the right length of clip

Length matters more than people expect. A very short clip loops obviously and starts to grate on a caller who has been waiting a minute, while a long track eats disk and takes longer to validate on upload. A minute or two of audio that loops cleanly back to its start is a comfortable middle ground. If you want the loop seam to be invisible, trim the start and end so the waveform meets at silence rather than mid-note.

Volume is the other thing to get right before upload. Telephone audio has a narrow dynamic range, so a track mastered for headphones can come through either too quiet to notice or harsh and clipped. Normalize it to a moderate level when you convert, then confirm it on an actual phone — not your laptop speakers — because the Asterisk codec path and the handset together change how it sounds.

One more practical note: name the file something you will recognize later. The audio store lists files by name, and a clip called moh-jazz-loop is far easier to find and re-attach than a string of digits. Reusing the same filename on a later upload replaces the old copy, which makes iterating on a clip painless once you have a naming habit.

Hold music sits in the same audio layer as greetings, voicemail, and TTS (text to speech) — the audio prompts and voicemail guide puts it all in one place. Prefer it preconfigured? VICIfast spins up a ready dialer — see pricing.