Convert any audio file to Five9's prompt format

The format Five9 requires

Five9's Basic Configuration Administrator's Guide puts it in one line: "Audio files require this format: WAVE audio, ITU G.711 mu-law, mono 8000 Hz." Some audio tools list the same format as CCITT u-Law, 8 kHz, 8 bit, mono.

Almost nothing records in that format by default. That is why a prompt file that plays fine on your laptop is not what Five9 asks for:

What the converter does

• Reads what you have. WAV files of any common encoding — 8-, 16-, 24- or 32-bit PCM, 32- or 64-bit float, A-law or µ-law — are read by ivrloom itself. MP3, M4A/AAC, OGG/Opus, FLAC and anything else your browser can play are decoded by the browser.
• Mixes to mono. Stereo channels are averaged, which cannot clip.
• Resamples to 8 kHz properly. Before dropping to 8,000 samples a second, a low-pass filter removes everything above what a phone line carries. Skipping that step folds high frequencies back into the call as hiss and metallic tones.
• Encodes G.711 µ-law and writes a standard WAV file: 8-bit, 64 kb/s.
• Lets you hear it as callers will. The preview plays the converted file, so you hear the phone-quality result before anyone else does.
• Catches a bad take. It warns when a recording is silent, very quiet or clipped.
• Handles a batch. Drop several files at once, then download each one or all of them as a .zip. Up to 12 minutes per prompt.

Nothing is uploaded

The conversion runs in your browser. No file is sent to ivrloom or anywhere else, and the converter needs no account. More on the Security & Privacy page.

Doing it by hand instead

You can produce the same format with free tools. These commands are equivalent:

sox in.mp3 -r 8000 -c 1 -e u-law out.wav
ffmpeg -i in.mp3 -ar 8000 -ac 1 -c:a pcm_mulaw out.wav

In Audacity: mix the track down to mono, set the project rate to 8000 Hz, and export as WAV with U-Law encoding. Each of these works. The converter saves the install, the flags and the one-file-at-a-time loop, and it tells you when a take is too quiet.

Skip the upload step too

With Five9 connected mode (beta), the conversion and the upload are one step. Choose Upload audio prompts… on the Five9 page's Prompts tab — one file or many, each becoming its own prompt — or Recorded audio when you create a prompt from the editor. ivrloom converts the files in your browser and adds them to your Five9 prompt library. To give a prompt Five9 already has new audio — next year's holiday greeting, say — choose Replace audio… on its row and type its name to confirm; callers hear the new audio at once, and because Five9's API cannot read the old audio out, keep your own copy of it. The audio passes through ivrloom's server to Five9 and is not kept. It is included in Team, and is a $19/month add-on for Solo — see Pricing.

ivrloom is an independent product, not affiliated with Five9, Inc.