pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "quad"
route_policy duplicate
}

ctl.usb {
type hw
card 1
}

After a few minutes of googeling I was thinking about /proc/interrupts but I have USB mouse and keyboard so I can’t find out if Im active at the computer that way, but I thought ‘how does gnome-screensaver do it?’ (I still don’t know that). More googeling and man page reading it turns out that I can run

gnome-screensaver-command -q

and it will tell me if the screensaver is running or not. Great, I only have to make a little script that check if the screensaver is running or not and run it once a minute in cron. The script worked fine when I tested it, but when placed in cron I got an error:

** Message: Failed to connect to the D-BUS daemon: dbus-launch failed to autolaunch D-Bus session: Autolaunch error: X11 initialization failed.

Huh? Well google results said the DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS was wrong, of course.. cron and environment variables.. Here my google searches failed me, or perhaps I didn’t look hard enough, but I turned to the great ArchLinux communety (thanx goes to Antti_Alien@freenode)(yes I left Ubuntu and installed Arch about a week ago) and here is what I came up with

#!/bin/bash
crap_var='awoiucnwv'
IFS=`echo -en "\n\b"`

i=$(gnome-screensaver-command -q | head -1);
if [ $i = "The screensaver is inactive" ];
then
if [ -e /var/lock/screen_saver_a.lock ];
then
rm /var/lock/screen_saver_a.lock
exit 0
else
exit 0
fi
else
echo $crap_var > /var/lock/screen_saver_a.lock
fi

Very simple, very efficient. It checks if the screensaver is running and creates a file with some crap inside it. if no screensaver is running it removes that file. So all I had to do now was edit my highlight event so it looks for the file. Works like a charm.

I havent thought of any other use for this yet but if I need it I know it’s easy.

First, create playlists:

find /home/novus/music -type f -iname *.ogg | sed -e 's/\/home\/novus\//file:\/\/\/home\/novus\//' > /home/novus/music.m3u
find /home/novus/jingles -type f -iname *.ogg | sed -e 's/\/home\/novus\//file:\/\/\/home\/novus\//' > /home/novus/jingles.m3u

This will first find all URIs for filesnames ending with .ogg in /home/novus/music and /home/novus/jingles (recursively) and then substitute /home/novus/ with file:///home/novus/ (this is needed or ARAS will not work, at all) and send it to /home/novus/music.m3u & /home/novus/jingles.m3u

Those playlists would be absolutely ok to play with ARAS, but we want them combined.

and random:

shuf /home/novus/music.m3u > /tmp/randommusic.m3u
shuf /home/novus/jingles.m3u > /tmp/randomjingles.m3u

and now let the “magic” begin:

sed -e 'i\\n\n\n' /tmp/randomjingles.m3u > /tmp/spacedjingles.m3u

here we’v taken the randomized jingles playlist and inserted 4 CRLF (new line) before each original line in /tmp/randomjingles.m3u (i\ is one line and each \n after is one line)

paste /tmp/randommusic.m3u /tmp/spacedjingles.m3u > /tmp/mixeduglyplaylist.m3u

here we paste the files together to one file, containing 2 fields, 1st field is the music and the 2nd is the jingles and empty lines. the 2 fields are separated with a single TAB

sed -e 's/\t/\n/g' /tmp/mixeduglyplaylist.m3u > /tmp/stilluglyplaylist.m3u

and here we replace all TABs with a new line

final thing we need to do before it’s finished is to remove all blank lines

sed '/^$/d' /tmp/stilluglyplaylist.m3u > /home/novus/playlist.m3u

so now we have a playlist that’ll play 5 random songs in /home/novus/music/ and then one jingle in /home/novus/jingles 5 songs, 1 jingle and so on.

one thing you need to keep in mind is that you don’t “run out of” jingles or music. if the music collection is 400 songs and if you want a jingle after every 5 songs you need to have 80 jingles (400/5) (or at least 80 URIs to jingles in u’r jingle playlist before adding the empty lines)

another thing to keep in mind is that ARAS isn’t forgiving on spaces in URIs, I solved it simply by running the rename perlscript (which you should have in one of u’r bin dirs)

WARNING! be careful where you are when running it!

~/music$ rename 's/ /_/g' *
~/music$ rename 's/ /_/g' */*
~/music$ rename 's/ /_/g' */*/*

that will rename every file and dir in current dir and 2 levels down

* simple to use.
* reliable.
* creating log-files.
* ability to put jingles and station IDs in between music tracks.
* being able to handle big music collections.

About 3 weeks ago I stumbled across ARAS (1.0 at that time) which looked really promising, it missed the options of log-files and it wasn’t possible to put jingles in between tracks, but it looked promising enough that I sent an e-mail to the developer (Erasmo Alonso Iglesias) with a wishlist and 3 days ago a new version was released that had what I was hoping for: log-files creation and m3u playlist support, so now whats left is only testing and some bash script writing for playlist creation.

To show status of a mixer just run amixer this will show the default card. I had to change to card 0 which for some reason isn’t the default so it’s amixer -c 0 that will show the status for card 0. To change volume the syntax is as follows.

amixer -c N set <SCONTROL> <PARAMETER>

N = card number, if your mixer shows as it should when amixer is run without parameters -c N is not needed
<SCONTROL> = Simple mixer control, the channel, you will see it when you run amixer (inside the single quites)
<PARAMETER> = how you want to change the volume (other things can be changed too) I use 5%+ and 5%-

so an example would look like: amixer -c 0 set Master 5%+

and I added keyboard shortcuts, for that just use your favorite shortcuts manager (like xbindkeys & xbindkeys-config)

about me:

25 years old (in 9 days) living in Sweden (Eskilstuna to be exact) computer geek migrated to GNU/Linux a few months ago and feel like a complete noob sometimes and Hammarby fan season card holder for the football (soccer for you ppl across the pond) club and goes to a few hockey/bandy/handball games during the winter. Working hard in a bakery, which it’s time to leave for now.