On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 12:39:11AM -0400, Peter Colijn wrote: > > Cool! I'll be sure to take a look. I'm wondering: I've wanted to > somehow add alarm clock support to Rhythmbox.. do you think your panel > applet would be a suitable place to put it? It seems like you've > gotten all the bonobo stuff sorted out to talk to Rhythmbox (well, > except for the one issue you mentioned :) so alarm support would > basically entail adding a UI for it and then just signalling Rhythmbox > to start playing at the appropriate time (fancy features like eg. fade > in could wait a while). > > If I wrote a patch to your applet, would you be interested in it? BTW, > I filed a bug against Rhythmbox for this initially, bug #145421 I'm not so sure this applet is the right place for it, since it's main goal is just to make it easier to operate Rhythmbox with the window hidden. Alarm functionality doesn't quite seem to fit, though I suppose I could be convinced otherwise. My first thought for setting up an alarm would be to make an at or cron job that runs "rhythmbox --play-pause" at a certain time. Unfortunately, if Rhythmbox isn't already running, all it does is start Rhythmbox like you would normally. (Would it be considered a bug that Rhythmbox doesn't start playing right away if you specify --play-pause when starting it?) I don't see an obvious way to start Rhythmbox if necessary and have it start playing without the risk of a race condition or unwanted delay. Plus, of course, with this method if Rhythmbox is already playing and the alarm goes off, you end up pausing playback. But if you were sleeping through the music already, I don't think the alarm will help you no matter how you handle that case. <g> If you don't mind not using Rhythmbox and have a particular song you want to play, you could run a command-line player out of an at or cron job for your alarm. But then there wouldn't be any easy way of shutting it off, which could be a problem. But even if you make an alarm via the Bonobo interface (whether through this applet or something else), there's the problem of not being able to specify which song to play or which playlist to choose it from. Well, you can specify the filename to play through Bonobo, but you're left with the question of how to let the user select one, since there's no way to look at the music library through Bonobo. The only thing I can think of would be to drag-and-drop a song from Rhythmbox into the alarm, if that would even work. If you don't care what song gets played when the alarm goes off, I suppose the above isn't a problem, unless the song Rhythmbox picks to start playing is John Cage's 4'33". <g> In my code, rb-proxy.c implements a wrapper around the Bonobo interface that makes it a lot easier for the GUI to use. It could certainly come in handy for writing a separate alarm program or applet, which might be the right way to go. I think I'd like the idea of building the current applet and an alarm as two separate applets better than trying to put it all into one. BTW, no need to CC me; I'm on the list.
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