Features

Hold music

Because a silent hold is indistinguishable from a dropped call.

Who it is for. Anyone who has said "hello? hello?" into a phone that was working fine.

The problem

Silence on a phone line means one of two things — you are on hold, or the call is dead — and there is no way to tell which. People hang up on working calls several times a day because of it.

What this does

Music, or any audio you like, plays while a call is parked or held. The caller knows the line is alive and stays on it.

Why it is worth a paragraph at all

Because it is the smallest possible example of what this project is for. Nobody would buy a “hold music” product. It is a two-line dialplan change that fixes a real irritation, and it exists here because the platform is yours and the mechanism is free.

That is the whole argument in miniature: the interesting features of a phone system are not individually big enough to sell, which is exactly why they were never available to households.

Details worth knowing

It is a folder of audio. Point musiconhold.conf at a directory and that is the hold experience. Seasonal, silly, or actually pleasant — the mechanism does not care.

You cannot ship music you do not own. Commission it, or use a CC0 source. A hold bed is the one place people reach for a favourite track and create a licensing problem for themselves.

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