New Hold Music Aimed At Sounding Better On Cell Phones
You’ve experienced the wobble and warble of hold music while calling a business on your cell phone. Perhaps as a business owner or administrator you’ve attempted to improve the annoying music on hold experience for your callers. The fact is, until we’re all using the newest technology, mobile phone connections are going to wreak havoc with the sound of music.[Tweet “Easy On Hold has added music categories to its on hold music offerings that actually sound better in tests on cell phones. “]
In response, Easy On Hold has added music categories to its on hold music offerings that actually sound better in tests on cell phones. First, an update on the ultimate solution to the problem: better audio quality on the cell phone.
Devices And Service Quality Affects Hold Music
Bandwidth has been increasing as much as 50% per year, according to a report by Neilson. The networks that handle your cell phone conversations, and all that data for texting and watching YouTube, need to handle more and more information. The demand for more bandwidth has led to some exciting improvements. Now some systems are able to give voice transmissions the priority they deserve.
Hiawatha Bray reports in the Boston Globe:
But now carriers are switching to a new system called VoLTE — Voice over LTE — that transmits voice calls over the phone’s data connection.
When Is True HD Cell Phone Quality Coming?
It’s true that the mobile communications industry has been slowly upgrading networks and devices to deliver “HD” quality sound. When I’m on my new Samsung phone, talking to someone with the same phone on the same network, the sound is brilliant–almost shocking. But we may be a year or more away from extreme quality audio on cell phones.
Testing Music On Hold For Cell Phones
Easy On Hold has participated in several tests that put various types of music on phone systems, then are monitored on various cell phone devices and networks. The theory is that the scarcity of bandwidth in the early days forced the frequency response on cell phones to a minimum. A piece of music, therefore, with a restricted frequency range will sound better than, say, a full symphony.
A majority of Easy On Hold customers contacting us with cell phone transmission problems have agreed that music with simple structures do sound better on cell phones. We suggest you conduct your own tests.
Simple Sounds: Hold Music Available
The Easy On Hold music jukebox now contains special categories of hold music that may help with cell phone music on hold quality:
The Simple category contains pieces with fewer instruments, or sparse instrumentation. There’s a variety of complexity offered, but in all the Simple category is a good place to start looking for good sounding hold music.
The Woodwinds category offers pared-down instrumentation as well, played by woodwind instruments such as clarinet, oboe and saxophone. These instruments produce a sound in a frequency range that can be compared to the human voice.
The Solo Instruments category is a collection of solo instrument performances. Keyboards, percussion, guitar, mandolin and other instruments offer a less complicated soundtrack that may be the right alternative for your hold music needs.
The Solo Piano category provides piano-only performances in a variety of tempos. As one telephony engineer told us, “Wouldn’t you know it, the tracks that work best for us are just simple piano music.”
The Future Of Hold Music
Since communication is a fast-changing industry, it’s important for a music on hold company to be ready for anything. Even with bigger bandwidth and better connections, we will still need to deal with noise cancellation features that are made to enhance voice but suppress everything else (including music), tower-hopping and cross-network hand-offs. If you’re ready to focus on creating a better phone on hold experience for your callers, working with a music on hold expert is a smart move.
