Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Rhythmbox Applet 0.1.0 Released

[Peter Colijn <pcolijn gmail com>]

Hi,

On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 01:10:49 -0500, Paul Kuliniewicz
<kuliniew purdue edu> wrote:
> 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>

Right, well the thing I don't like about using cron is there's no good
UI (or maybe there is a cron UI I don't know about, but still not very
specific to the task). I think the xmms-alarm UI, with a default alarm
time and then exceptions on certain days, is pretty good, for example.
You can do that with cron, more or less, but it's not very friendly.

> 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.

Yeah, that's the other thing; I was thinking of having a window pop up
when the alarm goes off that takes focus, and have spacebar act as a
snooze button. When you hit spacebar, the window goes away. Could also
be set up to work with a remote control of some kind, I suppose.

> 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.

That would be cool. I don't know if the Bonobo interface supports it,
but another idea would be to use a playlist. So from the applet you
choose the playlist you want to use to wake up. Like I say, I don't
know if the Bonobo interface supports playlists...

> 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>

Heh, yeah, the other thing about using xmms-alarm like I currently do
is that I also use xmms-imms. So now it's a really long time before a
song gets played that I hate. You'd think that'd be a good thing, but
when you're trying to wake up, hearing a song you *despise* can be
good motivation to get out of bed :)

> 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.

Hmm, I guess.. but this now means that I'm going to have *three*
rhythmbox-related things in my panel; the notification icon, your
applet, and my alarm applet. Seems like a lot of stuff just for a
music player :)

Have fun,

Peter