asterisk users - Oct 2005 - possible bug, what do you think?

We recently changed file formats on our server to wav49 from gsm.
Several users had saved messages in gsm format.  When a user attempts to
forward an old message to a user and they prepend the message with a
recording, the process seems to be flawed.  From what I can tell, the
prepend message is recorded to a temporary file, in my case
msgxxxx-prepend.WAV then after the prepend is finished recording,
asterisk attempts to merge the two audio files into one.  Since it
cannot find a msgxxxx.WAV file (the file is msgxxxx.gsm) it throws an
error.  The end result is that the user gets a new message envelope in
their INBOX (msgxxxx.txt) but there is no associated .WAV file to go
along with it.  The desired behavior here is to a) notify the user who
is attempting to forward this message that the process failed so that
the asterisk admin (me) can fix the issue or b) convert the file to the
proper format and then merge the two together.  What do you all think?

Thanks,
Andy

--
H. Andy Goss
Network Engineer
Network Advocates Inc.
Main: 502.412.1050
DID: 502.992.5933
Mobile: 502.387.8216
agoss@ntad.com

Andy Goss wrote:
> error.  The end result is that the user gets a new message envelope in
> their INBOX (msgxxxx.txt) but there is no associated .WAV file to go
> along with it.  The desired behavior here is to a) notify the user who
> is attempting to forward this message that the process failed so that
> the asterisk admin (me) can fix the issue or b) convert the file to the
> proper format and then merge the two together.  What do you all think?
Yes, that is a bug, but there is no simple way to handle it. 
app_voicemail would have to work quite a bit differently to make this 
work seamlessly.

Basically, what you need to do when you change the formats in your 
voicemail.conf file is manually go through the spool area and ensure 
that every message is present in all the selected formats, just as if 
those formats had been selected initially. Otherwise you can get very 
bizarre behavior, depending on the codec in use when a user deals with 
the mailbox.