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Comment by _whiteCaps_ | Hacker News Reader

I used to work helpdesk at an ISP, and we played the local classic rock station as our hold music. One of my best shifts was when a customer I put on hold asked to be put back on hold because they were really enjoying the songs they were playing. Done!

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Nobody can hear the hold music any more because the vocoders are voodoo and the mobile networks drop 99% of the packets. Only people on landlines and VoIP have any idea what your hold music even is. On mobile it's just undifferentiated screeching.

> On mobile it's just undifferentiated screeching.

Maybe the caller was a Norwegian death metal fan? ;-)

"What's that awesome track you were just playing? I tried Shazaming it, but it just came back with Beyonce. I can't find a death metal band covering any of her songs?"

The best 'hold music' I've experienced is from a small aircraft manufacturer; they play recordings from the tower at Oshkosh during Airventure, so much fun!

Unfortunately if you’re Dell and you try to do this you actually have to pay for every song they play. But first you have to know what song they are playing.

The obnoxious part is where companies like Apple who actually choose and license nice music play it in such a way it sounds absolutely horrible on the phone. What a waste!

It's a challenge to make music sound nice on the phone. From Apple, I'd expect they'd try to get their hold music setup for 'HD Voice' which would help, but just stuffing it into POTS is going to be pretty icky.

Surely if Apple though it was worthwhile, it'd be pretty simple for them to remotely fire up iTunes and play your iTunes Favourites playlist at full iTunes streaming quality through the phone app while on-hold with them. (And for the lulz, make it play every song you've ever skipped when you're on hold with Google. Which'd be one of those wait-10-years-before-anyone-finds-it type of easter eggs, 'cause that's approximately the time between real people finding an actual working support number for Google... ;-) )

The frequency passband on old-school analogue POTS isn't wide enough to play music with acceptable fidelity. The upper frequency limit for POTS services is 3.4KHz, which is far below the ~15Khz needed for half-passable music fidelity.

Modern digital is worse because it combines the frequency passband of analogue with combinations of codecs and bit rates that can't support the audio complexity of music.

You would think POTS music would be unbearable, but it wasn't. It was about as tolerable as AM radio.

In the age of Compact Disc, people are spoiled for audio quality ;)

The worst hold music I've heard was an advertising jingle for the company I was calling. Listening to that over and over will drive you insane and make you hate the company for putting you through it.

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