Converting Cisco UCCX Prompt

We wanted to share a quick and easy method for converting sound files to proper Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) WAV format to be used as prompts. Cisco UCCX server requires very specific WAV file format:

Format: CCIT U-Law Sample Size: 8-bit Sample Rate: 8kHz

If you are using OS X or Linux you can use a ‘file’ command to verify the sound format. Let’s assume that my file is prompt1.wav I can use the following command to see if it will work before uploading it to Cisco UCCX: file prompt1.wav

If I see:

prompt1.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAV audio, ITU G.711 mu-law, mono 8000 Hz

Everything is good and the file is using proper Cisco UCCX WAV format. But if you see something like this:

prompt1.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, stereo 44100 Hz

This file needs to be converted before it will work as Cisco UCCX prompt. A very quick and easy to use command line utility that can be used to do this is ‘sox’  the Swiss Army knife of sound processing programs (http://sox.sourceforge.net/).

NOTE: You may need to  install it first: brew install sox

Once it is installed you are ready to convert the files. To convert a single file you can use following example:

sox prompt1.wav -r 8000 -c 1 -e u-law prompt1ulaw.wav

The nice part about using a command line utility for conversion is a possibility to convert all files in a specified directory. Here is an example how to do that:

for f in *.wav; do sox “$f” -r 8000 -c 1 -e u-law “converted/$f”; done

This command should be executed in the directory containing your wav files, before running it create sub directory called ‘converted’. When the command is executed the converted directory will contain the same list of files converted to ITU G.711 mu-law, mono 8000 Hz WAV format.