This feature is available from Communication Manager Release 3.0.

The Locally Sourced Announcement and Music feature differs from the Announcement feature and the Music-on-Hold feature. The Announcement and Music-on-Hold features are single-sourced audio while the Locally Sourced feature is group-sourced audio. Locally Sourced Announcement and Music is based on groups of audio sources. Audio sources are assigned either to an audio group or a music-on-hold group.

Audio groups are made up of multiple sources of the same announcement or music. These audio sources can be located on any or all of the virtual VALs (vVAL) in a gateway, or media server. The VAL, vVAL board, or media server is assigned to an audio group. The audio group is then assigned to an announcement or audio extension as a group sourced location.

Announcement or music recordings are saved as wav file types. Each recording must be saved manually onto the vVAL board, or media server the same way as single-sourced announcements using an FTP program or VAL Manager. Each recording has the same file name within an audio group. The audio group can contain announcements and music.

A music-on-hold group is a collection of externally connected and continuously playing music sources. An example of a music-on-hold source is a radio station connected to a gateway using an analog station port. Multiple music-on-hold sources can be used in the same system.

As with the Music-on-Hold feature, only one music source is defined for a system or for a tenant partition. However, you can define a music source as a group of music-on-hold sources. Therefore, both non-tenant and tenant systems can use the group concept to distribute music-on-hold sources throughout a system.

When an incoming call requires an announcement or music-on-hold, the audio source that is closest to the incoming call trunk plays. An algorithm selects the most local source of audio to play for a call.

The most local source means that it is local to the trunk or user in the same Gateway in the same network region, in the interconnected network region, or is interconnected through an Inter-Gateway Alternate Routing (IGAR). An announcement file extension can be administered for queuing. Under queuing, if the audio source selected to play has no available playback ports, the request to play that audio is held in queue until a port on the source is available. If the queuing option is not administered for the audio file, the search for a local source continues as above.

Accessing audio locally minimizes audio distortion because the audio is located within or close to the same port network or gateway as the caller. Therefore, the Locally Sourced feature improves the quality of announcements and music-on-hold. This feature also reduces resource usage, such as VoIP resources, because the nearest available audio source of an announcement or music is played. Locally Sourced Announcements and Music also provides a backup for audio sources because multiple copies of the audio files are stored in multiple locations.

With centralized SIP trunking, the chances of having the closest audio source to the caller at the main or survivable core data centers are high. For playback to occur in survivable mode, remote gateways must be configured with the announcement and music files. So, it is recommended that Audio Groups are configured to ensure the solution is capable of playing announcements and music, regardless of the survivability status of the system.

For example: if a solution consists of a main data center with media server, survivable core data center with media server and survivable remote with gateway, then an audio group containing the three audio source locations of a media server from each data center and the remote gateway should be constructed. This ensures playback capability regardless of whether the solution is in normal or rainy day mode.

You can use an announcement or audio source extension with an assigned audio group anywhere that a single sourced announcement or audio source extension can be used. See the Announcements feature or the Music-on-Hold feature for information on single sourced audio.