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Starting with VoipNow 3.5, it is possible to use sounds at higher quality. Before this latest version, all the sounds from Asterisk were encoded at 8KHz. From now on, all sounds files are updated to higher quality 16 KHz. Such sounds are already available for download here. 

Step-by-step guide

Getting the sounds

Let's say we want to install a 16KHz French sounds pack recorded by June Wallack, on VoipNow 3.5. For that we need to download the proper archive.

mkdir /root/french

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cd french

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wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/sounds/asterisk-core-sounds-fr-sln16-current.tar.gz

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wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/sounds/asterisk-extra-sounds-fr-sln16-current.tar.gz

Extract sounds from both archives and arrange those sounds in the correct format for a sound pack. Basically, all the sounds that are not part of a folder must go to a fr folder that you need to create.

mkdir fr

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mv *.sln16 fr

On In all the other folders, except the new fr folder, there must be a fr folder with all the sounds from that folder. Basically, every other folder must include a fr newly created fr,  there must be a fr sub-folder containing where all the sounds must go. For instance, all the sounds from the dictate the dictate folder must go under the fr in the fr sub-folder that must be created under under dictate. In At the end, the directory structure must be have the following structure:

├── dictate
│   └── fr
├── digits
│   └── fr
├── followme
│   └── fr
├── fr
├── ha
│   └── fr
├── letters
│   └── fr
├── phonetic
│   └── fr
├── silence
│   └── fr
└── wx
    └── fr

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In order to convert from the slin16 format to wave, we can use sox. The following command converts a sound to the proper format used by Asterisk:

sox -t raw -r 16k -e signed-integer -b 16 -c 1 <input>.sln16 output.wav

There are a lot of sounds in those folders. Using the following script, all sounds will be converted to the desired format:

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Once the sounds are converted, you need to move them to the folder used by Asterisk to store sounds and set the correct owner for those files: 

cp -Rap * /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/

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chown -R asterisk: /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/

At this point, you need to select the French as Phone language in the "Edit User" section in phone language select.

Down-sampling files the required format

If sounds are recorded in a professional way or with a professional recorder that is not able to record uncompressed wave at 16KHz, you may use the following command to down-sample those files:

sox sound.wav -e signed-integer -c 1 -b 16 -r 16k sound-down.wav 

For an automated process, the following script will down-sample all the wave files from the /root/sounds folder (assuming they are stored there) to the required format used by Asterisk:

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