Converting Cisco UCCX Prompts

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. The Cisco UCCX server requires a 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 you 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 the 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 a 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 the 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 the possibility to convert all files in a specified directory.

➡️ Here is an example of 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 creates a 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.