Tin Cups and String: The Convergent Microsoft UC Blog

Quality can be an issue when you’re trying to record custom greetings to use with Exchange 2007sp1’s limitations of 8KHz, 16-bit, Mono sound files.  Sound Recorder is often used to handle the recordings, but it doesn’t do it well.  While researching a way to handle this better I stumbled upon a freeware application called Audacity that, after a few simple configuration changes had acceptable quality for our clients.

Audacity can be found here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Once downloaded (currently a 2.1MB download) and installed set the following:

• Open Preferences under the Edit menu

• On the first page (Audio I/O) Mono should be set by default

• Click the Quality tab and set Default Sample Rate to 8000 and the Default Sample Format to 16-bit:

• Click the next tab, File Formats and set the Uncompressed Export Format to WAV (Microsoft 16bit PCM):

• Click OK and you can begin recording, you will see your settings on the Audio Track you’ve recorded:

• When you’re happy with the recording go to File\Export as WAV and save your work.  You can now upload the file to Unified Messaging and assign the greeting to your Auto Attendant.

More tweaking can be done to tune the audio track, though I had luck with just these changes.  Of course you’ll always want to record with a decent mic in a quiet room.