What the Active setting does on a Music On Hold class

Every VICIdial Music on hold class has an Active setting, and it is one of the clearest on/off switches in the admin. Active decides whether the class gets written into the live hold-music config that Asterisk reads, or stripped out of it. Set it wrong and a queue that should play music will sit silent — so it is worth knowing exactly what the toggle does.

What Active controls

VICIdial turns your Music On Hold classes into an Asterisk config file. The Active setting decides whether a given class makes it into that file:

• Active = Y — the class is written into the live config, so Asterisk knows about it and any queue pointed at it can play its audio.
• Active = N — the class is removed from the config entirely. Asterisk no longer sees it, and anything pointed at it has no hold audio to play.

So Active is not a mute button on the music — it controls whether the whole class exists from Asterisk's point of view. The record stays in VICIdial's admin so you can re-activate it later, but the config-side entry disappears while it is inactive.

How the toggle reaches Asterisk

Flipping Active does not edit Asterisk directly. VICIdial regenerates the hold-music config on a timer and includes or excludes your class based on the setting:

flowchart TD
  A[Set Active and submit] --> B{Active is Y}
  B -- Yes --> C[Write class into conf]
  B -- No --> D[Remove class from conf]
  C --> E[Asterisk reload picks it up]
  D --> E
  E --> F{Class present}
  F -- Yes --> G[Queue plays hold audio]
  F -- No --> H[Queue has no MOH]

Because the config is rewritten on a once-per-minute schedule when there are changes, the switch is not instant — give it up to a minute. The class is built on Asterisk's own hold-music engine, so what VICIdial writes is the bridge between your admin choices and what a parked caller actually hears as One-way audio.

When to set a class inactive

Use Active = N when you have built a class for a campaign that is paused, or when you are staging a new hold playlist you are not ready to use yet. Deactivating keeps the record and its files around for later without cluttering the live config. It is cleaner than deleting, because deleting the class also gives up the file list and Rank order you set up.

The files inside the class still have to be valid audio. Active only governs whether the class is published — if a file is in the wrong Recording format (WAV/MP3), activating the class will not fix it. To get your files right before you activate, read how to convert audio for VICIdial.

The Active toggle is one small part of VICIdial's audio setup. For the full tour of hold music, prompts, voicemail, and TTS (text to speech), read our VICIdial audio prompts, voicemail, and TTS guide.

VICIfast gives you a dialer where the Music On Hold engine is already running, so flipping a class active is all it takes to put it live. See our pricing to get started.