[ms office - o365] OWA / Office 365 voicemail .wav files cannot play from email

[Koldov]

Our admin/receptionist has just phoned down to say that she can no longer play voicemail files from her email like she used to...

 

Obviously in full Outlook there are more options (preview/open/save as), but she is using OWA/O365 and the option doesn't seem to be there.

 

The only option now is for her to save it first (either download or OneDrive).

 

I'm not sure if it the 'open/play' option ever was there or when it changed (the user is a bit vague about the details), I've had a quick look and can't immediately see any settings that enable or disable this function.

[mavhc]

What's generating the wav files? Can it be changed to mp3?

[Koldov]

It is being generated by our phone system (3rd party provider). I can ask the question but I'd bet that it records in .wav for quality and can't do the conversion.

 

The strange thing is why the OWA/o365 application can't preview a .wav but can for an .mp3 (I would've thought .wav was a more universal file type/format)...?

[andy_b]

Could be because mp3 is easier to support.

 

Pretty much guaranteed to get MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 but with WAV you could get a variety of encodings?

[mavhc]

It's a phone call, there is no quality

[Koldov]

Yes, of course, but I'm thinking maybe in the developers mind mp3 wouldn't have been the main choice when it came to recording an audio file and emailing it.

 

I've found out with things like Audacity that functionality doesn't just come ready out of the box (needing Lame). Plus I'm not sure how old the software is doing the recording...

 

I'm not saying they'd go to the extreme of a lossless audio codec for 'quality' or one that might rely on 3rd party/conversion or licensing.

 

.wav just seems the obvious choice for recording audio, I knew there were different qualities but hadn't looked into different encodings

[mavhc]

Wave is just a container format, says almost nothing about what's inside it, can be compressed, 6 channel, and can include arbitrary metadata including other Wave files.