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    [SOLVED] Grandfather clock wanted

    Well, yes and no.

    Because of yet again another reduction in classes generated by now the public school retirement system ... this just gets worse and worse, all of the part time retired teachers are now down to half of our previous classes.

    That has forced a very large change in lifestyle for the ol' woodsmoker and it has mainly created a situation where I am in an apartment ALONE five days a week except for interval waking, swimming and tghe occasional foray out into the wilds of tghe dating scene.

    i have always just kept "music going" OR "news" especially the last few years on the large screen Kparadigm shift machine but that has kind of lost it's luster and it occured to me to... "put a grandfather clock" on the machine...

    Well grandfather clock the app does not work, it has an error message about not being able to "fill line 120", but it is an old app and that kind of thing is to be expected running Neon.

    The obvious answer is to download a "grandfather" mp3 from YouTube and that works just fine there are many versions, some of which sound great and others not so much.

    But it would be very nice, especially in the spirit of the Christmas season to have " a grandfather clock chime" also that would at least reasonably hit the correct hour.

    And there are many youtube chime vids but they are always associated with midnight or whateve.

    It isn't that "the BONG BONG of toling the hours is needed" the "leadup chime before the BONG BONG would work just fine and I can easily extract that part of a video as an mp3 but...the problem that has arisen is this;

    I, personally, cannot find a widget or an app that will actually "play a sound file hourly"... really...I have tried every widget clock and clock app for KDE and none of them will play a sound file hourly. I even tried Cairo-Clock and "clocky" for Conky...;.;

    I think that maybe that is why the fellow actually tried to make the grandfather clock ...lol...

    The best option seems to be cron or mcron, but i can't seem to figure out how to actually get cron to play a sound file ...I KNOW there is a man page that has -chime as an extension to do it but I can't seem to get the silly thing to do it.

    So...here is a two part question.

    A) Does anyone know of an obscure clock that they kNOW will play a sound file "on the hour".
    B) Does anyone know of any "GUI" or "fix" or "alternate" to cron that can be configured to play a sound file?

    The idea being that I just let part of the youtube video loop, i can do that to provide "tick tock" and the "clock" or the "cron type thing" to play the chimes hourly. AGAIN I do not need the thing to play "bong bong bong" for three o'clock all that is needed is that I set it to hourly play a chime file.

    Any help would be most appreciated!

    woodsmoke

    #2
    https://sourceforge.net/projects/grandfather/
    Just follow the instructions on how to setup up crontab and make sure to leave out the quarter (15, 30, 45) settings in crontab. To keep the bongs down to just one each and every hour you might have to rewrite the file that runs that part. Other than that you could get a sound file write a simple bash script to play one sound and add the whole shebang to crontab for every hour (0 minutes). The grandfatherclock program shows how to setup crontab to get it to run on time.

    Comment


      #3
      Hi TommyB

      Thank you for the nice reply.
      The linky is to .rpms which are one number higher than the .deb which I found.

      the deb returned an error in line 120 forgot precisely what it said, and I figured that the situation was this is a neon machine.

      When I tried to use alien to convert to .deb it returned the following.

      unable to mkdir grandfatherclock-1.0.3: at /usr/share/perl5/Alien/Package.pm line 257.

      So no go on that front.

      I tried making a cron thing and as I posted above apparently i just don't really understand the whole cron thing.

      But, again, thanks for the help.

      woodlikedthesuggestionssmoke

      Comment


        #4
        Hi
        please read the post prior to this for possible perspective.

        So, I now have installed grandfatherclock 1.0.1-2, which for a Neon developer edition is "the newest version"
        It is in usr/bin.
        Using Krusader I was able to "run" it and the following was returned which was the prior situation a day or so ago:
        Unable to execute >cat /usr/share/grandfatherclock/Grandfather.au > /dev/audio: Illegal seek at /usr/bin/grandfatherclock line 210.
        so this may be whole cron thing don't know.

        Line 120 is blank here is what is below:


        # If the command-line arguments are invalid, indicate usage
        if ($error) {
        print STDERR "Usage:$0 [-v] [-c command] [-a device] [-g gain]\n";
        print STDERR " [-f file] [-p tolls] [-q] [-t time] [-d dir]\n";
        print STDERR " [-h file] [-1 file] [-2 file] [-3 file] [-4 file]\n";
        print STDERR " -1 1st quarter chime [$q1]\n";
        print STDERR " Q1_FILE\n";
        print STDERR " -2 half hour chime [$q2]\n";
        print STDERR " Q2_FILE\n";
        print STDERR " -3 3rd quarter chime [$q3]\n";
        print STDERR " Q3_FILE\n";
        print STDERR " -4 hourly chime [$q4]\n";
        print STDERR " Q4_FILE\n";
        print STDERR " -a audio out device [$device]\n";
        print STDERR " AUDIO_DEVICE\n";
        print STDERR " -c play command [$command]\n";
        print STDERR " PLAY_COMMAND\n";
        print STDERR " -d chime directory [$dir]\n";
        print STDERR " AUDIO_DIRECTORY\n";
        print STDERR " -f configuration file [$config]\n";
        print STDERR " -g gain [$gain]\n";
        print STDERR " PLAY_GAIN\n";
        print STDERR " -h toll [$toll]\n";
        print STDERR " TOLL_FILE\n";
        print STDERR " -p pause after tolls [$pause]\n";
        print STDERR " PAUSE_BETWEEN_TOLLS\n";
        print STDERR " -q sound the quarter [$opt_q]\n";
        print STDERR " -t time HHMM [$time]\n";
        print STDERR " -v verbose [$opt_v]\n";
        print STDERR " play command substitutes:\n";
        print STDERR " %a - output device\n";
        print STDERR " %f - sound sample file\n";
        print STDERR " %g - gain\n";
        here is what is in crontab:

        #!crontab
        # Project: Emulate a grandfather clock
        # Copyright: This package is licensed under the terms of
        # GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, June 1991
        # You should have received a copy with this package.
        # Usage: crontab $0
        # Author: Dr. Robert J. Meier, Jr.
        # History: 00-03-22 -rjm- file creation

        # .---------------minute 0-59
        # | .--------hour 0-23
        # | | .----- day of month 1-31
        # | | | .--- month 1-12 (or names, see below)
        # | | | | .- day of week 0-7 (0 or 7 is Sunday, or use names)
        # | | | | |
        0,15,30,45 * * * * grandfatherclock -q
        The actual sound files are in : home/downloads/grandfatherclock-1.0.3/lib

        I dunno but usually stuff like the sound files are supposed to be "in the path" but Dolphin won't let me move them I COULD try moving them using Krusader since it will let me do root, but dunno don't want a sound file for this get in the way of a sound file for opening say... the OS lol

        woodsmoke

        woodsmoke
        Last edited by woodsmoke; Dec 21, 2018, 03:34 PM.

        Comment


          #5
          Well, I fiddled with this and fiddled with it and gave up.

          But, then it did occur to me that there might be a RECORDING of a grandfather clock on YouTube.

          So, after a lot of searching of QUITE A FEW recordings of such I found one that is "one hour and a minute or so" with the sound of just "one chime". However it has a slightly higher "pitch" than a tall grandfather clock, it is a literal recording of a real wall clock and runs "fast" by maybe, don't know, about two minutes, but when I downloaded it and ran it with Kaffeine with repeat "on", then it did, indeed, fulfill the basic requirements of the original request.

          Also I did find a recording for...eight (8) HOURS of a grandfather clock with no chime at all. It is intended to be a "meditation" thing for meditators... lol

          anyway, putting it on replay on Kaffein it fulfills the bill.

          so, anyway, when I just can't seem to do anything except "tossing and turning" it seems to put me right off to sleep.

          So, this thread can be deleted or not, my permission to so do is given with this post...as if the ADMINs could CARE about my wishes! lol...

          woodsmoke

          Comment


            #6
            Place this into crontab. test mplayer before running to make sure it's installed.

            Code:
            [FONT=monospace]0 * * * * mplayer "<location>/Chime.mp3"
            [/FONT]
            You can even use a 59 second ticking file and also include

            Code:
            *[FONT=monospace] * * * * mplayer "<location>/Tick.mp3"
            [/FONT]
            , but probably better to use another player set to repeat.

            Comment


              #7
              Hi
              thank you for the nice advice! I will try it!
              woodsmoke

              Comment

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