Hold music on held outbound calls
When you press Hold on a connected outbound call, the person you called hears your organization’s hold music instead of dead silence. Taking the call off hold stops the music immediately and reconnects your audio. Recording and live transcription continue exactly as they do on an unheld call, and holding never drops or redirects the call: it only changes what the far end hears while the call is held.What the called party hears
- Your organization’s hold music loops to the called party for as long as the call is held.
- Unhold stops the music at once; the conversation resumes where it left off.
- Recording and live transcription keep running during the hold.
- The bridge between you and the called party stays up for the whole hold, so nothing needs to be re-dialed or re-bridged on unhold.
Scope and limits
Hold music on hold applies to outbound calls that you dialed and that are bridged. When you hold, the platform identifies the called party’s leg on the live call and plays the track to that leg. The limits below are by design, not defects:- Outbound bridged calls only. Inbound calls are unchanged: placing an inbound caller on hold mutes your side and the caller hears silence.
- A bridged callee leg is required. If the call has no dialed leg to play to (for example, a direct agent session that never placed an outbound call), the call stays on silent hold.
- Playback is best-effort. If the music track cannot be started for any reason, the call is still held, just without music, exactly as before this feature shipped. A hold never fails because hold music failed.
Which music plays
The track is resolved in this order:- Your organization’s hold-music override. This is the same
organization setting that warm transfer plays while a caller waits
on a consultation leg. It accepts two shapes:
- A plain
https://URL to an audio file you host. The URL is checked before playback: links that point at private or internal addresses, or that fail validation, are refused and the platform default plays instead. The same applies to values longer than 2,048 characters. - An uploaded audio asset handle (
audio:asset:<fileId>, in the shape your uploads return). The playable link is re-signed per call, so an uploaded track never expires while configured. If the asset no longer exists, the platform default plays.
- A plain
- The platform default hold track, when no override is set or the override was refused.
hold_music_url, set wherever you
update organization settings, including the Organizations API.
Hold-treatment map
Orbit plays hold music in several places, each with its own source. Use this map when changing what callers hear while held:
The last two rows share one override: setting it once changes both
warm-transfer holds and manually held outbound calls. Per-queue hold
music applies to neither. An IVR node’s own hold settings apply only
while the caller is inside that node.
Troubleshooting
The caller hears silence when I hold them. Expected whenever one of the scope limits applies: the call is inbound, the call has no bridged callee leg, or the track could not start on this call. The call is still correctly held; only the music is absent. This is the designed fallback, not a fault. The wrong music plays. Check whether your organization has a hold-music override set: when present and valid it replaces the platform default on warm-transfer holds and manually held outbound calls. If you expected a queue’s music on a held outbound call, note thatholdMusicUrl applies only
to callers waiting in that queue; see the map above.
Is this the same as [pause:Xs] in prompts?
No. [pause:Xs] is a prompt-authoring cue that inserts silence
between prompts while a flow plays audio to a caller; it does not
control what a held caller hears. Hold treatment is covered on this
page; prompt cues are covered in
Prompt delivery cues.