The Asterisk Solution

This is a message I sent out to the Asterisk community after having a chat with representatives of which at the LinuxTag 2008, archived for future reference.

As current maintainer of the mpg123 project (yes - it _is_ active again; officially since two years now), I from time to time get requests from asterisk users on how to set up mp3 decoding for music-on-hold (I guess) with mpg123. For several years, there prevailed a really unfortunate situation in that respect:

Now, enter 2008! Thanks to the hard work of the mpg123 team, there is a current successor to the venerable 0.59 that

The revived mpg123 is entering standard distibutions at moderate pace... version 0.67 is in debian lenny, gentoo has 1.3 and 1.4 . Pkgsrc-wip is working on a current version. Clearly, there is still some work to do to make it known better and this posting is part of that. Also, personally, I would like to lower (to zero;-) the number of people who ask me about troubles they have with asterisk and some outdated mpg123 or even the faking mpg321.

So the first major message I would like to give to the asterisk community is that there is a current, active mpg123 and that the old way of calling it in a pipe to produce 8kHz pcm audio from MPEG files works just fine, provided you use a current one. The second message is: In case you want to avoid the trouble of external programs, that may even call themselves mpg123 although they aren't mpg123, you can use the libmpg123 that is provided by mpg123 since version 1.0 for an asterisk input module. There is API documentation on http://mpg123.org/api

Alrighty then,

Thomas Orgis, mpg123 maintainer.

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