Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Rhythmbox Applet 0.1.0 Released



On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 01:10 -0500, Paul Kuliniewicz wrote:
> 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.

IMO, I think the applet would be a great place for the alarm and/or
other features not included in the mainline (such as the lirc support I
currently manually patch in).

> 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>

Yes, hmm, interesting point.  I currently use xmms-alarm for my alarm
purposes which is a bother since I use rhythmbox for all other music
purposes.  It has good features such as setting/fading-up the volume
levels, etc, but I've never checked what would happen if music was
already playing.  I suppose if it was already playing you would just
activate the alarm anyway.  If you were listening to music at a low
volume level before falling asleep and then had the alarm set to pump
the volume up to 100% which would obviously wake you.

> 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.

It's definetly a rude awakening sometimes depending on the song I choose
but I usually just stumble from my bed and hit the speaker's power.  :)

> 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.

The alarm should activate the play-pause or if it's in a playing state,
just set the volume and/or other parameters.  So whatever song is ready
to play will be the alarm (this is how xmms-alarm functions).  Your DnD
idea sounds good as well.

> 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>

My roomate and I woke up every day last year to either Barry White's
"Can't Get Enough Of Your Love Babe" or Wu-Tang's "Wake tha f*** up".
It was definately an interesting semester... :)

> 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.

Perhaps part of your Bonobo wrapper could be considered for inclusion in
the 0.9 branch, which last time I checked, was still lacking Bonobo
functionality.  I'm not sure what plans Colin currently has up his
sleeves.

In other news, I'm putting the finishing touches on a gaim plugin that
automatically inserts the currently playing song into your gaim profile
(with a link to the lyrics) on a Bonobo song-change event.  It's already
done but just needs some polishing so let me know if you'd like an
advance copy.

Regards,
Jon Oberheide

-- 
Jon Oberheide <jon oberheide org>
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