It's really hard to find some decent hold music that's available for commercial use.

Recently when we were upgrading our ancient digital PBX to an Asterisk IP based PBX for DBS, one of the hardest tasks that we had was not technical in nature.

Most of the technical issues that we had were surmountable by searching Google and asking questions on IRC channels. Something that us IT guys are really good at doing is working out how to get around technical problems.

But this was about music on hold. You know when you ring up a place and you get put into a queue or get put on hold while you get transferred. Well that music has to be either royalty free, or you have to pay royalties for it.

In our case, we just wanted some really simple, decent sounding hold music that was freely available and usable for commercial purposes. Oh and please, please, please: not classical. I have nothing against classical music per se, but everyone who rings up and hears classical music just knows that you grabbed some random free music online and didn't bother with any further effort.

This being the case, and after a few hours searching the interwebs for other music, I decided to give Garage Band a go. It's been sitting installed on various different Macs I've owned for the past several years and apart from the few times I've started it up and jabbed a few buttons with my mouse, I haven't really ever 'used' it.

Now I'm no muso, but using the Magic Garage Band feature in the newer versions of the software is really easy. It allows you to select a genre of music, assign the different instruments you want to use and at the end you have a piece of decent music that you can use for your on hold music, completely royalty free.

For those who don't have Garage Band, or can't be bothered tinkering around, I'm making my created music available for you to use royalty free under a BY-SA Creative Commons license.

However if you do own a Mac and have Garage Band installed, you should totally make your own hold music! It's reality-alteringly simple and you're gonna get some really decent original music out the other side. Give it a go!

DBS MusicOnHold (7Zip file, 27.5Mb)