Notices

Hello,

Asterisk can send its voicemail email attachments in wav, ogg or wav49 formats. Wav49 is compressed and works out of the box on Windows and Linux, which means I can get my email on any workstation I happen to come across without having to install anything.

Maemo 5 doesn't understand wav49, even with the extra codecs pack.

Has anyone else got this working, or have suggestions?

Thanks,

Paul

Feel free to vote for bug 4252.

GSM isn't wav49 and GSM doesn't work out of the box with Windows without additional codec installs.

So it doesn't meet my requirement.

No, GSM is a codec while WAV is a container format. However so-called "wav49" is 8KHz GSM under the WAV encapsulation. See also bug 6724 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wav.

No idea what works on Windows, sorry.

Can you maybe upload one of those voicemail files that is compressed and works out of the box on Windows, then someone can analyse it to check the codec?

If you go into the Asterisk voicemail configuration file (/etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf on a regular Asterisk or /opt/asterisk/etc/voicemail.conf if you're running Asterisk on the N900 itself) you will find a line in the [general] section that looks like this:

format=wav49|gsm|wav

Change it to:

format=wav|wav49|gsm

In order to get Asterisk to work with this new configuration, get on to your Asterisk command line and issue the following command:

*CLI> module reload app_voicemail.so

...and you should now find that your voicemail attachments will play on the N900 media player.

One more thing: The first time you do this you may experience continual repetition of the message, as (for whatever reason) the media play comes up in auto-repeat mode (coloured blue when on) - pictured below.

All you need to do is touch the auto-repeat symbol to turn it off (the symbol will go white) and this setting will be remembered for the future.

So now your Asterisk voicemails should playback perfectly!

BTW - these files should also play on desktops (Windows tested successfully) so this appears to be an all-round solution.

Sorry, I didn't see your post until now. Did that a while ago, see the aforementioned bug 6724. Note: I have no idea whether that works out of the box in Windows.

When you change the format in voicemail.conf you need to convert pre-existing stored voicemails manually on the server. It would be better to just rearrange the order so what wav comes first (the first format listed is the one used for email notification).

Except now the attachements are huge, which is probably not what you want (if you receive voicemail there's a high chance you're on the road with a slow/expensive GPRS connection).

Very useful information. Although it would still be nice if it was possible to make "wav49" work on N900, for those who cannot change the Asterisk config.

And for those who can indeed change the asterisk config but do not want voicemail files the size of a building - wav is uncompressed.

Agreed Ima - it would be better to have a smaller codec in use.

Maybe (until we get GSM on the N900) a quick change to the out-going voicemail announcement saying "Leave a message, but keep it short!" is in order ;-)