Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[pa_mcclamrock]

WISH Music Time 2012 (http://www.pa-mcclamrock.com/papenguinspacks.html#musictime) is a simple countdown timer and music player with a Tcl/GTK+ interface. It requires Tcl (http://www.pa-mcclamrock.com/tcl-8.5.6-v1.pet) and Gnocl (http://www.pa-mcclamrock.com/gnocl-0.9.95-20110429.pet), as well as two programs built into recent versions of Puppy: mplayer (to play .mp3, .wav, and .ogg files) and ffmpeg (to find out how long the playing time for those files will be). If you want to play MIDI files, you also need TiMidity++ (http://www.pa-mcclamrock.com/TiMidity++-2.13.2-tk.pet). (Since it uses mplayer for playing, it probably wouldn't be too hard to modify it to play video as well as audio--but that would have to be done by someone who has more interest in video than I do!)

I came up with WISH Music Time to please my wife, who objected to the loud, monotonous, insistent beeping of the little timer I used to time household events with. After my "alpha-minus" pre-pre-release version succeeded in pleasing her (except when I turned the volume up too loud), I decided to try to give the program enough features to please some other people, too (though not those who demand huge numbers of fancy features). Here are some of them:

* NEW in WISH Music Time 2012: Playing times for all .mp3, .wav, and .ogg files are listed with the file names; playing times for MIDI files are added after playing for the first time; file list can be sorted by name or playing time

* Single-click playing of individual music files or playlists, with or without counting down some time first

* Quick, easy setting of countdown times with spinbuttons or custom-designed, easy-to-create "time lines"

* Countdown to fixed time of day or specified number of hours, minutes, and/or seconds

* Easy-to-create playlists with selectable, movable items