Enhancement: Use alternative to system beep for alarms

[rlabbe]

I want this for two reasons. One, I have the default sound theme on my computer set to nearly silent. I don't want to be beeped at me continuously, and so default beep is set to "none". Second, a single beep is not very noticeable. I have my alarms set up to alert me to get ready to load beans, for example. I want a very persistent alarm so I can't miss it. I set it to the obnoxious alarm01.wav sound on my pc, which gets my attention for the 3 seconds it plays, but now every time I click in the wrong place or whatever I get this same sound. Ugh.

The source code currently uses QApplication.beep() if you ask for a beep with your alarm. This triggers the system default sound It would be great if we had an option to select a wav file for the alarm. You should be able to use QSound.play(filename) to play the wav. Even better would be to offer the option to have it loop; the alarm dialog that pops up would either call QSound.stop() when closed, or offer a button to silence the alarm.

This may not be entire cross platform compatible, but I would imagine nearly any system running Artisan can play wav; if not, the default beep will still work (in my scheme, I'd use the default beep if the user did not specify a custom alarm sound).

I poked around, it looks like you aren't currently packaging QtMultimedia, so that would be an additional import, which might be a pain if you are using conda (for whatever reason conda doesn't include QtMultimedia).

[das3in]

This is a cool idea. I think there's a lot of hidden complexity in a file upload system, so a decent first pass might be to:

• Customize beep with a .wav file
• Ship Artisan with, say, 3 different beeps
• Expose the folder location on the wiki so people can drag and drop their own files we don't need to worry about upload/validation infrastructure.

I'll poke around at this this weekend. Good idea!

[MAKOMO]

Not sure if Artisan needs to be modified for this. macOS offers the shell command afplay that can play any type of sound files and you can configure an alarm to call that command like many are currently using the command say to make alarms talk. I am quite sure that something like this exists on the Windows platform as well.

[reizao]

Yes. In windows you can call app espeak

[rlabbe]

I modified my local copy; I used the Python library playsound, which is cross platform (I've only tested on Windows 10).

from playsound import playsound
def alarm_sound():
    playsound('c:\\windows\\Media\\alarm01.wav')