UCCX: Converting Audio Prompt

You have been asked by your customer to update a menu prompt or insert a Holiday message to the script and they provided you with an audio WAV file or an MP3 file recorded either using Windows Recording application or any other application for that matter.

Most often than not the file provided you will not be in a format acceptable to UCCX.

I am sure you already know that Cisco UCCX Prompt, CUC greeting audio file or CUCM MOH wave file must all adhere to a strict format before you can upload it to the system. If you don’t convert the file in an acceptable format and go ahead with the upload then a system will accept the file but it will not work leaving you scratching your head as why it is not working!

The file must be in this format:

• Audio Sample Size : 8-bit words
• 8000 samples per second
• Audio Format: CCITT u-law
• Channels: 1 (Mono, not stereo)
• Bit Rate: 8-bits x 8000 = 64Kbit Audio

Looks confusing? don’t worry! I will explain.

Audacity is a simple free software that will convert your file in any format to above Cisco acceptable format. I use it all the time and currently using version 2.1.1 at the moment but you can download the latest from their website.

Before you convert the file it would be good to know which format your current file is in. The easiest way which I normally do is play the file in VLC Player. If you don’t have VLC then you can download it for free.

Play the file and while it is playing go to Tools > Codec Information and a window like below will open with all relevant details.

As you can see below the file is not in the format mentioned above so we will need to convert the file using Audacity.

 Open Audacity and drag it open the file in it.

Note format and settings on the left hand side. File is Mono and bottom shows bit rate which is 44100 Hz.

Make sure the file is Mono otherwise you can drop down the little arrow near file name and select “Split Stereo to Mono”. Once you select that the file will be split in two. You may close one and just keep one open in the window. Because the file in this example is already Mono so I skipped this step and as you can see that option is grayed out. Once this is done go at the bottom of the file and change bit rate to 8000.

Next Select File > Export > Change the Save as type to “Other Uncompressed Files”

Click the Options button at the bottom right

Select WAV (Microsoft) for Header and U-Law for Encoding

Click OK

Choose a name and save

Click OK to Edit the Metadata

Now play the saved file in VLC and check Codec information

The file is now in acceptable format.

You may now upload the prompt in UCCX.

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There is one more scenario which I came across once when I got some audio prompts from a customer in MPEG AAC format. This format is not acceptable in Audacity which means you cannot convert it to Cisco format. Well, I found a workaround for that.

Open VLC player and then go to Media > Convert/Save

You will get this first screen: From here browse to the file and then at the bottom Convert/Save drop down and go to Convert. You will come to the second screen where you select “Audio CD” under profile and bingo! You will have a file in Audacity Acceptable format and now you can convert it to U-law 8000 Hz.

In this post I have discussed how to convert an audio file using Audacity for UCCX Prompts. This same procedure can be applied for a Unity greeting or a MOH file.

There is another way to record a prompts in UCCX using a CRS script which is quite handy as you don’t have to do any conversions or uploads and the prompt is saved in the repository for you to just point script to the prompt or just overwrite existing prompt. I will discuss that in my next post.

I hope this post was useful. Let me know in the comments down below if you have any queries regarding this post.