(xmms|bmp)-alarm

Beep Media Player

I have played a bit with the xmms joystick plugin code to get it to work with BMP from CVS, this is just my own little hack to get the code working, it is not intended to be a real release of a joystick plugin for BMP. Anyone who wants it can get it from here. I don't know if the configuration stuff really works, I just copy and pasted my joystick settings from ~/.xmms/config into ~/.bmp/config. Please don't send me any patches or anything to make it better, this is just a one off that I thought someone might find useful.

It looks like there have been more changes made to bmp than just how the preferences window looks. Thanks to Olivier Blin for porting xmms-alarm to the new ConfigDb system and naming, and for sending me a patch for bmp itself so I have a General plugin setup tab to play with ;) Now I can use bmp-alarm in bmp, just need to get the joystick control plugin to work then I can stop using xmms. You can get bmp-alarm for bmp-0.9.7 from here but you can't configure it until the bmp preferences stuff is done :) Another thing that has changed is the alarmconfig file, ~/.bmp/alarmconfig will not be used anymore so if you upgrade bmp-alarm then you will need to set your alarm times and stuff again. bmp-alarm-0.6.0 is _only_ for the current CVS version of bmp, you should get version 0.3.6-bmp1 if you are using a bmp release version 0.9.6.1 or lower.

Thanks to Zac Luzader for letting me know that xmms-alarm seems to work OK with the beep-media-player 0.9.6.1 package in Debian (beep-media-player-dev package is also required to compile the plugin), and for finding a left over ~/.xmms which would break ./configure --enable-user-dir. When CVS BMP supports General plugins I should be able to start testing xmms-alarm myself with it (0.9.6.1 just wont work for me :( ).

xmms-alarm might work with beep media player. I have never tried it (I can't even get BMP to start up for some reason) but I have made some small changes to get xmms-alarm to compile with gtk2. It is reported to compile, get recognised by BMP and have a working configuration box but it may not be working as expected (thanks to Brian for testing this - and for letting me know BMP existed). Until I can get BMP working I can't really do much testing, all I can do is check if it compiles :). Anyone who feels like playing with it can download xmms-alarm for BMP here, but the code is still experimental.

How do you use it?

A few people have emailed me asking what to do after they installed xmms-alarm, so I have made a quick page about How to use xmms-alarm 0.3.x. Let me know if you think something needs adding or changing.

Packages

Dag Wieërs has kindly made some RPMs of xmms-alarm, you can get them from http://dag.wieers.com/packages/xmms-alarm/ or you can install them with apt-get (on Red Hat) by following the instructions here. Debian users can install xmms-alarm the same way as they install any other package because it is now part of the distribution. Thanks to Dave O'Shaughnessy for creating the slackware 9.1 package, to oxman for the Nasgaïa package and Harry Auschner for SuSE packages.

Compilation problems?

If you get errors about missing header files then make sure you have the xmms-devel, glib-devel and gtk-devel packages installed on your system.

Latest version is 0.3.7 (tar.bz2)

The return value from nanosleep wasn't being checked. It is now checked and nanosleep restarted if needed. This may fix some problems with the volume fading.

(0.3.6) Fixed 'Tueday' typo.

(0.3.5) Fixed a bug which was added in the last release where the volume would not be able to fade down when the 'quiet after' option was used. Also modified the volume fading so that if the xmms volume was being changed by another plugin (eg, IRman or Joystick) during fading, then xmms-alarm would not ignore those changes (Thanks Kaspar).

(0.3.4) Can now load mp3/ogg streams as a playlist, but not playlists given as URLs because xmms doesn't support that yet (Thanks Thomer).

(0.3.3) Updated the autoconf/automake scripts and fixed this bug which I only found out about a few days ago. A few small bugs waiting to be discovered have been fixed too.

(0.3.2) Hopefully stopped the plugin being random and sometimes dying if you decided to disable it while it was busy fading the volume, thanks to someone known only as dstrek for noticing this :).

(0.3.1) Fixed a bug which was really confusing me where the alarm was restarting when it was already going if the fade time was less than a minute, thanks to pthreads for that :). John Watzke cleaned up the source a bit and Jason Arroyo came up with a patch to fix a playlist loading bug.

Old releases:

Changes in version 0.2.2-fixed:
- There was a bug which killed the plugin when it tried to bring up the "wakeup call" dialog, this has now hopefully been fixed - I have been testing it for a while and it hasent died yet, but please let me know if the problem is still there. Arent gtk and threads fun :) Thanks to Paul Mineiro for first reporting this to me.

Changes in version 0.2.2:
- configure.in has been fixed so that it works with "other" shells (Daniel)
- added option to set the starting volume when fading, seems that volumes under 20% dont do much.
- done a bit of testing and "hidden" a bug until I decide what the best way of fixing it is :)

Changes in version 0.2.1:
This version was released by Daniel Stodden. I would like to thank him for the great work he has been doing on it while I have been revising for exams
- Now uses autoconf/automake.
- The UI has been redone and now looks alot nicer.
- Added support for loading a seperate "wakeup playlist".
- You can now choose a time for the alarm to turn off (for if you ignore it).
- Ontop of that, the code has been cleaned up alot too :)

Changes in version 0.2a:
- Fixed the makefile so it should now link with the proper libraries on more peoples systems (can't guarantee all systems though).

Changes in version 0.2:
- You can now choose the time taken for volume fading.
- A command can also be executed when the alarm time is reached.

Released version 0.01 sometime in june 2000.