Music On Hold

[billbrachh]

Hi !

First post, so be gentle !! If I'm "reinventing" the wheel here, just give me a nudge towards a post.

I have been tasked with a neat little project that I think Puppy would be perfect for. My son has a small business that he'd like to have short voice announcement fed into his phone system's Music On Hold jack (a mono RCA connection)

Requirements are pretty simple:

* System should auto-boot into the music player and start playing sound files in a specific directory.

* Would like to use older hardware. Have a smallish Dell Gx-110 w/1GHz processor and 10 Gb drive, that should do the job nicely. It pulls about 40 watts, so this is good too. This machine will be plugged into a UPS, so rebooting ought to be infrequent.

* Thinking of using a command-line audio player, such as mplayer. Probably would be a good idea to kill mplayer periodically, in the middle of the night, and restart it to guarantee it hasn't frozen up. This might be especially useful if someone used this for streaming an internet station.

* Web based interface, VNC or xhost would probably work for the front-end. As the network this will be attached to is mostly Windows- based, might need telnet or SAMBA on it too, so its drive can be accessed and refreshed with new announcements, without having to physically go to the telephone system closet. In my situation, I barely have room for a mouse, keyboard, and monitor, but it is doable.

* Operationally, I'd like the sound files, probably in MP3 format, as that is easy to do with many pieces of software. As I said, a specific directory would contain the sound files. Something like file1.mp3, file2.mp3, file3.mp3, etc. When the system booted, it would start playing file1, then file2, then file, THEN restart at file1. Maybe a play list might be the best way to handle this, I have not looked into the mplayer documentation yet. I'm not married to mplayer, but it seems like a good choice.

So, is this doable, and is there somebody that would like to help on this project? I'm pretty much capable of making at least a first pass on trying to do this, but might run into problems that this "slightly-advanced linux newbie" cannot figure out.

ALL suggestions warmly welcomed !!

Bill

[tasmod]

Not so much as a nudge to another post but advice.

Dedicated 'Music on Hold' units are quite cheap on ebay and are a plugin fit. usually with a CF card slot as well.

They normally come with two or three royalty free tunes. That's because Performing Rights society are red hot on any phone delivered music.
They have 'on commission' agents to check for such.

They pestered me for a fee when I had my unit playing 'pop tunes' I switched back to royalty free Musak. I then made up a small voice ad that played when on hold, they can't touch that.

[billbrachh]

Thanks Rob, all we intend are in-store generated announcements, no copyrighted material at all !! I guess that makes us the copyright holder.

[ecomoney]

Welcome to the kennels. Perhaps asterisk is what you are looking for?

http://www.asterisk.org/

I havnt seen any mention of it being run using Puppy before, or seen a package for it. If you ask nicely Im sure someone will make it for you.