mgetty ringing, and also vgetty...

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Hi,

Stephane Doyon wrote:
> First a fairly simple suggestion: I use the same phone line for incoming
> voice and data calls, so mgetty is typically in ringback mode. However I'd
> like to receive one or more automated data calls during the night. The
> problem of course is that then the real phone would ring, which would
> disturb my sleep. I could disactivate the real phone's ringing when I go to
> bed and reactivate it the next morning, but I don't like this solution
> because of two important drawbacks: first I risk forgetting the phone on
> when I go to bed or off when I get up (thus missing some calls). Second, if
> there's some emergency call coming in during the night or early morning, I'd
> miss it.
> 
> An idea I had was to have the phone's ringing always turned off, and have my
> computer make some noise when the modem says "RING".

I oppose this. Why? Because it's a "special" hack, and will make mgetty
operation less reliable.

Mgetty should concentrate on the *modem*, not on sound devices, etc.

You can easily hack this in (add a call to system( "myplayprogram"); to
mgetty.c/main()/St_wait_for_ring), but I won't include it into mainstream
sources.

The best way (for which mgetty was designed) would be to get a second
phone line for data/fax and keep your voice line as voice line...

[..]
> The second thing I wanted to ask was is this list appropriate for discussion
> of vgetty? 

Yes.

> I have a USR modem with voice support (I'm not sure it's the best
> one to have for voice support but it's the one I have) and I'm trying to get
> vgetty to work with it. I've made some progress, but I'm no expert in voice
> modem nor vgetty code.

The USR will be supported some day in the future, but right now, I haven't
found anyone with enough time to do the programming.

> The FAQ says that the voice extensions are maintained by Klaus Weidner.

The FAQ is outdated. Steve, could you change this? Vgetty is now
maintained by Marc Eberhard, eberha@physik.tu-muenchen.de.

> However the work does not seem to have progressed since april, 

Work has progressed, but nothing has been released yet.

[..]
> - zplay, if called with -D, must stop the playback as soon as a dtmf tone is
> detected, which it does not do. This may be caused by a different modem
> behavior...

No, it is not meant that way. It will stop playback after *all* DTMF tones
are required. I think you're confusing this with zplay -C.

> - How to improve sound quality? It's really not very good. This may be
> hopeless...

This is a modem problem... on the ZyXEL, sound quality is quite good.

> - Conversion of the sound files to any of the conventional formats. THis is
> the most important of my problems. The utilities provided with vgetty are
> for zyxel and don't seem to work with the encoding used by my modem. I'l
> have to do my best to get through to USR technical support and get the
> necessary information... Would the "rockwell.c" program work? 

No. USR uses a GSM modulation technique (similar to cellular phones). I
have the necessary information, but no conversion tool has been written
yet.

> Where is the missing external rint() function?

dunno.

> - Finally, getting vgetty to officially support USR voice modems...

This is definitely desirable.

gert

-- 
                                                            //www.muc.de/~gert
Gert Doering - Munich, Germany                             gert@greenie.muc.de
fax: +49-89-3545980 <---new!!!              gert.doering@physik.tu-muenchen.de