Want to play music for your callers while they wait for you to answer? It’s easy and can all be done through the free PBX GUI.

Go to the “Music on Hold” option in the admin menu on the left. Get the recordings setup how you would like them. I uploaded a few MP3s and enabled random play to spice things up a bit. These songs will now play for the caller on the other end if you put them on hold. Easy, right?

Now, to play music over the trunk to a caller you will want to navigate to the “General Settings” menu. Look at the “Dialing Options” section. You will see two options: “Asterisk Dial command options” and “Asterisk Outbound Dial Command Options”. In my version of FreePBX the first was set to “tr” and the second was empty. The “t” is for transfer and “r” is for ring. Change the “r” to a “m” and your hold music will play for the caller while they wait. Enter an “m” in the second option and your internal callers will hear music as well while they are calling. Check out the before and after screen captures below.

The default settings

The updated settings

Enjoy!