complich8’s journal

So a long time ago, I realized that I wake up better with music helping me along. But the last year or so I’ve been using my cell phone as an alarm clock (’cause it’s always on a charged battery and has good clock synch).

Yesterday I tried the music thing again, using an at-job ( at(1p) in the man pages) and mpg123, and it worked great. But pre-selecting a track is sorta lame, so I thought “maybe I can do a shuffle thing, using my old radio scripts” — until I realized that that’d require both work and more metadata-parsing, which I don’t feel like doing ’cause I need to wake up in 7 hours. So I thought “radio stream!”

So I grabbed a PLS from one of the most salient radio stations I could think of, and tossed mpg123 at it. Of course, it didn’t work. So I tried tossing the stream url itself at it, and it didn’t work because the stream’s aac+. Bleh.

Then I tried mplayer … ’cause mplayer’s natively command-line. And it worked from the console, so I thought things would be good. Then I put it in a test at-job, and it didn’t fire off, because while mplayer’s natively a console app it’s also natively interactive. So that was out, unless I launched it in screen… but that would just get complicated.

Then I remembered. mpg123 is a very unixy tool (as opposed to linuxy). So I built mpg321, and tried with that. SUCCESS!

So there you have it: if you want to listen to radio streams from at-jobs, remember mpg321!

And in 7 hours and 5 minutes, my at job will go off after an initial alarm clock ring, and I’ll drag myself up and go fight traffic down to my new job!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 12:48 am and is filed under Beyond Nerddom, life and times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.