Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Rhythmbox Applet 0.1.0 Released



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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