asterisk users - May 2023 - A stupid problem with Playback

On 5/27/2023 11:37 AM, Steve Matzura wrote:
> Acording to the book, I'm supposed to put things into what Asterisk 
> thinks is its default audio file location, /var/lib/asterisk/sounds, 
> and I'm supposed to be able to create a custom directory off of that 
> path and use it in a relative-syntax way in the Playback directive, 
> like so:
> ...
>
>     same => n,Playback(mysounds/mygreeting)
>
> I'm here to tell ya, it doesn't work on my system. However, if I
write:
>
>     same => n,Playback(/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/mydir/mygreeting)
>
> it works fine. Where is the default directory defined? I search every 
> configuration file and found no such definition.
/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/en
Relative paths are relative to your language-specific directory.
> And then there was this: When I finally got my system working after 
> all the connectivity and extension-not-found and endpoint-not-found 
> nonsense straightened out, I of course tried the hello-world standard 
> startup test. It didn't work. Why? Because when you install Asterisk 
> version 16 from the Debian distro site, you don't get the core sounds, 
> and when you do install the core sounds package, they don't get put 
> into /var/lib/asterisk/sounds. Oh no--they get put into 
> /usr/share/asterisk/sounds. In there, I found several directories such 
> as 'en' and 'en_us'. I copied the files from the en_us
directory into
> /var/lib/asterisk/sounds and hello-world worked fine. So then I 
> created a custom directory and put my own things in it, changing the 
> Playback statement to the first one above, and it failed. I have to 
> specify the full path instead of using the relative syntax version 
> thereof. This is technically not a problem, more just a curiosity as 
> to why it didn't work the way I thought it's supposed to.
A great reason to avoid Asterisk packages and compile from source 
instead. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches.

On 5/27/2023 11:40 AM, asterisk at phreaknet.org wrote:
> Relative paths are relative to your language-specific directory.
>
Ya know, that's the one thing I didn't do was test Playback before 
copying the sound files out of /usr/share/asterisk/sounds/en_us into 
/var/lib/asterisk/sounds--I don't even know for sure that hello-world 
was playing from the /var path and not the /usr path. Good idea to test 
that and see what's really going on. I think I set too much store by 
these books sometimes. But when that's all I have, I tend to go with 
what I know, and if the book is all I know ... well ...

> A great reason to avoid Asterisk packages and compile from source 
> instead. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches.

That's how I started, by trying to build version 18 from source. It 
failed. Colossally. The compile of sources would run for a while, then 
the machine would crash spectacularly--I mean, not just hang or reboot. 
It actually turned itself off. I tried it several times, and each time 
it failed in the same way, but at a different spot in the compile 
process. If ever I could figure out a way to trace that one down, I 
would. It was the strangest thing. So I gave up trying to build from 
source and went to the distro. Truth to tell, I'd rather have been able 
to build it from source because then I could follow my book more 
closely, and I enjoy and am familiar with working with SQL. I understood 
perfectly what the book was telling me to do and how it would all 
integrate with configuring Asterisk. Very strange indeed. Maybe I'll try 
a later version and see what happens.