Evening music
February 22, 2015
February 22, 2015
I like to listen a few songs the night in my bed before actually sleeping. But I hate having to get up again to stop the PC, and I don’t have any kind of remote control.
Ideally, I wanted to say “play 10 songs and shut down”, or “play 30 minutes of music, wait the end of the song and shut down”. Turns out this is trivial to do with a music server like MPD.
I’ll use mpc to controll the MPD instance from the shell.
mpc idleloop player | head -18; poweroff
The mpc idleloop player command will listen for player events. A
player event will fire when the song is seeked, the end of a song is
reached, and the current song is changed.
In my case, nobody’s seeking anything, and when the next song is
naturally selected, it will send two events (end and next), hence the
head -18 (twice the number of songs I want, minus two because it’s
about “next song” events). The head command will exit when the given
number of lines are printed.
Originally from this tweet.
sleep 30m; mpc idle player; poweroff
This one speaks for itself:
Sleep for 30 minutes, idle until the next
playerevent, and shut down.
Originally from this tweet.
I also like the volume to go down slowly while listening to music before sleeping. This is extremely simple to do (here, I manage my sound with ALSA):
while :; do amixer set PCM 1%-; sleep 3m; done
This will lower the PCM channel by 1% every 3 minutes. Tweak to your tastes!