Tenant Resource Configuration

Sounds

The Sounds tab shows the list of sounds configured for the current tenant. Any messages or sound loops to be played to agent or customer must be configured here.

Sounds Tab

Fig. 1 - Sounds

Using this Sounds facility, sound files are automatically uploaded to the web server, where they can then be used as resources by a media server or Softdial Telephony Gateway™ (STG).

Sound file references in Softdial Repository™ (e.g. queue message sounds) are treated as relative to the root file path for sounds on the SCC web server.

Any sound files to be used must be WAV files in either uLaw or ALaw format, to avoid any need for transcoding when caching the WAV file.

WAV files for all standard tones are installed by default centrally on the web server, in:

  • %SOFTDIAL_ROOT%\WebServer\www\softdial\sounds\uLaw
  • %SOFTDIAL_ROOT%\WebServer\www\softdial\sounds\ALaw

The standard STG configuration, when referring to WAV files, expects a URI for the various 'static' resources.

This can be

  • a fully-specified URI, e.g. http://mydomain/com/mypath/mywavfile.wav
  • a filename
  • a relative path

STG performs expansion of the URI with the following rules:

  1. If the URI has no file extension, the extension is assumed to be .wav
  2. if the URI is not fully specified, the root path used is http://<web server host>/softdial/sounds/

The default config follows this pattern:

<heartbeatFile>%%companding%%/heartbeat.wav</heartbeatFile>

The %%variable%% syntax is used for parameter substitution. The set of variables that can be substituted is:

  • the WEB_HOST heyword, which resolves to the fully-qualified name of the web server
  • the SOFTDIAL_ROOT and SOFTDIAL_LOGS environment variables
  • any of the root configuration elements with an underlying data type of string.

The default config for system sounds should not require changing and should resolve to a URI to the right file.

For example, on a UK setup

%%companding%%/heartbeat.wav

resolves to

ALaw/heartbeat.wav

which gets expanded to

[http://]http://<webhost>/softdial/sounds/ALaw/heartbeat.wav

STG instances will be required to play many WAV files, repeatedly, for different sessions.

STG retrieves WAV files from the web server and caches them locally, either in a configured directory or a subdirectory of the machine's temp folder, enabling a central source of audio resources with a media cluster.

Cached files are either permanently cached or age out if not used.

All of the standard tone WAV files are permanently cached. This means they never age out and can only be updated by restarting the media server.

Cached files that are not 'permanently' cached age out after not being used for 30 minutes. This figure is configurable via the setting wavCacheAgeOutMins in the STGconfig.xml file. On aging out a WAV file, the local copy of the WAV file is deleted and its entry in the STG cache is removed. If requested again, the resource is reloaded.

There are various points in the API and the ASD® configuration that refer to sound files, e.g.

  • The Symbolic Name (SN) and Play Message (PM) parameters for various messages sent to CallGem
  • various queue configurations
  • the default campaign/ tenant config options

In all cases, these are interpreted as URIs that pass through the Softdial Repository™ and CallGem's APIs transparently, and are then expanded as per the rules above.

Sounds cannot be edited because once they are uploaded they cannot be changed. Therefore, the Edit button is not available.

When New is clicked, the sound properties dialogue is shown (Fig. 2)

Uploading Sounds

Fig. 2 - Uploading Sounds

Setting Description
Upload sound file Click Browse... to locate a sound file. On clicking Save, the file is uploaded to the web server at an automatically generated location.

The Name column in the Sounds list (Fig. 1) simply uses the filename. Therefore, before uploading, sound files should be given descriptive filenames to aid identification.