Then, in the lower left hand corner of your Audacity project screen, change the Project Rate to 8000 (it will most likely be at 44100). And in the week hours of Sunday morning, I stumbled on a process, posted not on a VO site, but on a Cisco tech site, that would allow me to use good old Audacity:įirst, record and normalize your prompt in mono. But, I was ready to buy it – I mean, AOL pays me big bucks to do their phone prompts, and they need to be kept happy.īut, I kept searching. The demo worked like a charm on my files. I recently revamped my studio, and got rid of a number of older Windows machines, one of which had an app built into the operating system that would convert these files just fine.īut…alas, no longer do I have that tool at my disposal.Īnd after hours of testing every Macintosh sound editing and conversion software out there, including Switch, Sound Converter, Fission, ProTools, ffmpeg and front-ends for ffmpeg, And I finally found an expensive solution: BarbaBatch. Why? Storage was a premium consideration in The Old Days – these files are tiny compared to standard WAV files.) (For you techies, the older systems don’t want standard PCM encoded 16 bit 44.1K full fidelity WAV files, they want CCITT mu-law encoded 8 bit 8K files.

In fact, they are so old and outdated that most sound converters don’t even offer the option to convert regular old WAV files into what these older systems want. I’m the on-hold voice, the voice you get mad at while you’re waiting for the opportunity to get mad at a real live person, for many of the Fortune 5000, including AOL.ĪOL has systems that go back decades (I’ve been their voice since 1988), and although I can send them WAV or MP3 files for the modern systems they use, those older legacy systems are really picky about what kind of files they can play to callers. I do a lot of IVR work – and it’s one of my most popular classes. So, what’s the secret of using Audacity to create phone prompt WAV files for ancient IVR systems?

(And do refer back to this little snippet of a screenshot when I reveal this Secret.)

And I’m going to save you too – especially if you do IVR work for older phone tree systems. I came THIS close to spending nearly $400 this weekend that I didn’t need to.

Wav to ulaw converter