MOH

landtuna said:

Years ago the most popular MOH used to be either a radio station (local) or Muzak. Lately I don't hear either one. Has something changed regulation-wise that would prevent picking a local station for MOH or is it a financial thing?

Fully agree most MOH tend to alienate callers - especially the ones with non-stop advertising.

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Pretty much everyone runs VoIP. To play a radio station on hold you would need to stream the audio. Streaming the audio puts more load on the processor than playing a file. Most VoIP appliances use low power chipsets, and processing the call is more important than the music on hold, so they play files.

The first thing I had to do with ours was delete all of the files that came loaded on the phone system and replace them with ones normalized to be much softer at the bitrate that the system preferred. That made a big difference. But you can still get the bursts of static when on a cell phone thanks to dueling codecs.

I was on the phone with one of my credit card companies a few days ago, and was placed on hold. Their MOH was amazingly clean, with no white noise bursts. The volume (for my end anyways) was perfect. Never any drop-outs of audio. The music selection was perfect, and was not one of the (over utilized) files I normally hear when placed on hold. I'd have to say that judging from all of the MOH audio I've had to suffer through, ever since dealing with companies utilizing VoIP, this is a very rare exception. With the advancement of VoIP, it's just too bad we had to go backwards in MOH audio quality, and MOH audio performance. One would think that you would want to calm the person on hold, instead of irritating them, with crappy MOH. My mood was much more relaxed, when my credit card representative was ready to assist me.

frankberry said:

My experience is that a VOIP phone system has better audio quality than an analog phone system.

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VoIP is much better than analog when set up properly, but T1/PRI (also digital) is more reliable since it doesn't use the internet. It's also more expensive, but you can have up to 24 phone lines on one T1 trunk..

When FOX13, Tampa, installed their VOIP phone system, I recorded the MOH files. I was impressed with the playback quality. The problem isn't whether the system is analog or digital ... The problem is sloppy production of the MOH audio.

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If you saved your MOH files as .wav files, then that was the way to go. Using compressed files like .mp3 can be problematic, especially if the VoIP circuit is using a low data rate.

Also, the phone system has to be set properly for QOS (quality of service), and your internet connection has to be able to support it (most do nowadays). That means that phone call packets will be given priority when being routed since they are in real time, as opposed to reading a web page or email, or watching a YouTube video.

One major broadcast equipment distributor has great old radio station air checks on hold...

Brian Bowers said:

Thank you! I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing this stuff. Even back in the late 90's, and early 2000's, I had to complain to Harris (when I used to order broadcast equipment from them, when they were a distributor/vendor). They had one of the latest digital phone systems, which probably had a chip with one song on it, and I used to call them so much, and was put on hold so often, that that one song drove me CRAZY.

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I bet it was "Opus No. 1", the default hold music in Cisco phone systems:

https://blogs.cisco.com/collaborati...ry-behind-the-song-youll-definitely-recognize