On the heels of Kevin Fleming’s announcement yesterday discussing the changes in the Asterisk versioning scheme, we’d like to formally announce that Asterisk 10, Beta 1 is now available for community testing. Asterisk 10, a Standard Support release, will be the next major release of Asterisk and follows the release of Asterisk 1.8 LTS, a Long Term Support release. For more information on the different releases of Asterisk, check out the Asterisk Versionspage on the Wiki.

Let’s talk about some of its new capabilities.

A major focus of the Asterisk 10 development cycle was Asterisk’s support for media types. In versions of Asterisk 1.8 and prior, Asterisk supported a rather limited number of codecs due to some architectural limitations. Plumbing was ripped out, kitchens were remodeled, girders were swapped, and Asterisk 10 now has a media architecture that’s capable of handling both a nearly unlimited number of codecs as well as codecs with more complex parameters. What does this mean for users? First, it means that Asterisk now comes with some additional codecs, including the 32kHz variant of the Speex codec (previous versions of Asterisk only supported the 8kHz or 16kHz variants), Skype’s Superwideband SILK codec, and pass-through support for the 44.1kHz and 48kHz variants of the CELT format.

Astute readers will note that earlier versions of Asterisk were only capable of operating on 8kHz and 16kHz sampled audio, and that the aforementioned newly-supported codecs operate at rates other than these. You’re absolutely correct. In order to support these new codecs, Asterisk 10 has also been provided with support for a variety of super and ultra-wideband sampling rates, all of which are supported as file format types for file playback or recording.

Read the rest of this entry »