cruxports/deadbeef-alarm

alarm clock plugin for DeaDBeeF

About

This plugin allows the DeaDBeeF music player to serve as an alarm clock.

Even with its comprehensive set of command-line options, DeaDBeeF is ultimately a graphical program, in most cases completely unreachable from the restricted environment in which crontab shell scripts are executed. The MPRIS plugin[1] does allow some control of the media player from a crontab script, but because a script executed by cron usually cannot find the dbus session bus address in its environment, this variable must be hard-coded in the shell script you intend to use for activating DeaDBeeF. (For a clumsy way to automate the hard-coding of session bus address, you might add some sed commands to your window manager's autostart script, overwriting a definition line in the activate-DeaDBeeF script.) Then having surmounting this obstacle, you'll discover that the MPRIS plugin implements only one method for selecting a particular file for playback: OpenUri. Even if xdg-mime could be persuaded that the file extension m3u indicates a filetype audio/x-mpegurl rather than text/plain (so that the OpenUri argument is not immediately rejected upon receipt of the dbus message), the MPRIS plugin only implements OpenUri using the method deadbeef->plt_add_file2, while a playlist would require deadbeef->plt_load2. So to assemble an entire playlist using the methods available in the MPRIS plugin, you would have to parse the metadata of each song to determine how long the parent process should sleep between successive calls of OpenUri.
TLDR: working around the limitations of crontab and MPRIS is more trouble than building a specialized plugin for alarm clock functionality.

To close the gap between DeaDBeeF and its console-interface counterparts (moc, mpd, cmus -- all of which can be controlled by scripts in a crontab), this plugin translates the essential components of the audacious alarm plugin[2] into the DeaDBeeF idiom. The configuration dialog lets you choose which days of the week the alarm goes off, what time of day, and which playlist you want loaded. Leaving the playlist field empty (or selecting an invalid file) will just start playback at the beginning of the current list when the alarm goes off.

1. https://github.com/Serranya/deadbeef-mpris2-plugin
2. https://github.com/audacious-media-player/audacious-plugins/tree/master/src/alarm

What is missing

The following features were present in the audacious alarm plugin, but have not been implemented here.

• Volume fading from quiet to loud after a fixed time interval. If you need that kind of control, all the underlying audio stacks (ALSA, OSS, Pipewire, Pulseaudio, sndio) offer command-line mixer tools that work fine when executed within crontab scripts, and you can just leave the DeaDBeeF volume slider at its highest level.
• Stopping the playback after a specified time interval. (TODO: let the plugin itself turn off repeat mode if that behaviour is desired, simply by adding a "disable repeat mode" checkbox to the alarm configuration dialog. It then becomes the user's responsibility to make sure a playlist of the appropriate length is selected, so playback doesn't continue past the transition from sleep to wakefulness.)
• Setting a different alarm time for each day of the week. Sleep professionals recommend that you stick to a consistent bedtime and wakeup time for optimal health. (But if you have a healthy sleep regimen in the first place, you probably wake up at the right time without an alarm. Omitting this feature thus makes the plugin less useful to people who genuinely need a mechanical disruption of their established sleep-wake cycle.)

How to install

For CRUX users

• cd to a directory in your local ports overlay
• download the source code from this host:
  httpup sync https://git.sdf.org/jmq/cruxports/raw/branch/master/#deadbeef-alarm deadbeef-alarm
• prt-get depinst install deadbeef-alarm

For users of other Linux distributions

• check that all dependencies and header files are installed (DeaDBeeF and glib)
• save the source code and the Makefile (https://git.sdf.org/jmq/cruxports/deadbeef-alarm/alarm.cc and https://git.sdf.org/jmq/cruxports/deadbeef-alarm/Makefile) into a working directory.
• cd to the working directory and run make. Invoke make with GLIB_CXX_FLAGS="$(pkg-config --cflags glib-2.0)" and GLIB_LD_FLAGS="$(pkg-config --libs glib-2.0)" if your distribution has installed the shared glib libraries in non-standard locations.
• run make install , optionally prepending a custom setting for PREFIX (such as $HOME/.local) or DESTDIR.

How to contribute

Patches are welcome. See the header of the accompanying Pkgfile for contact information.