Does Potato have the ability to play sounds on activity?

[adelinfdm]

Back when I was using SimpleMu, I had the ability to setup sounds to play when an important even occurred or when activity occurred in a world that I didn't want to miss activity from for whatever reason. Does Potato have this kind of functionality? If so, I am unable to find it.

[talvo]

It's not something that's currently built-in, mainly because doing it cross-platform was a pain and I never got around to it (so far). It's possible, though, either by adding a library or by using an existing external program to play the sound. What operating system are you on, and what formats are the sounds you want to play?

[adelinfdm]

I am using Windows 10 currently and the sounds would either be .wav or .mp3. From: Mike Griffiths [mailto:notifications@github.com] Sent: Tuesday, October 6, 2020 5:28 PM To: potatomushclient/potato Cc: adelinfdm; Author Subject: Re: [potatomushclient/potato] Does Potato have the ability to play sounds on activity? (#515) It's not something that's currently built-in, mainly because doing it cross-platform was a pain and I never got around to it (so far). It's possible, though, either by adding a library or by using an existing external program to play the sound. What operating system are you on, and what formats are the sounds you want to play? — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#515 (comment)> , or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ANWLALIJQ6R2DCP7ZKLBQYDSJODXXANCNFSM4SFAJSBQ> .Image removed by sender.

[fuzzyweapon]

The ability to control sound alerting is what ultimately one of the main things that has driven me away from Potato MUSH client. I have ADHD and can get horribly hyperfocused, forget I'm in conversations, etc.

As a user example, what helps me when I'm MUSHing from my mac is to use the Atlantis mush client. It allows me to flash the screen, play a system beep, and/or play a sound file when something important happens using their equivalent of an event system. I use all of these: system beep for light background awareness, sound files for big events like an important person logging in, flashes with the system beeps. Basically I'm always trying to build out my MUSH client configs for being constantly distracted in another window.

I don't need all of this cross-platform, but the ability to play a sound file on an event trigger would be fantastic. Equally, the ability to outright play one via a /command would be good for macro usage. Then I could finally automate ship travel and have it ding when I've arrived for manual intervention. XD

I would prefer a library if I'm going to throw my 2 cents in for implementation, only because I don't want extraneous applications popping up or constantly being on when they aren't needed.

[talvo]

In terms of a system beep:

/eval bell

will do that. If you want to play a wav or mp3, there are a number of different options for different platforms in Tcl for doing so. One of the main cross-platform ones I can recall is called Snack:

https://www.speech.kth.se/snack/download.html

In Potato, type:

/eval file normalize $potato::path(userlib)`

to get the path where you can install Tcl packages (plugins). Install Snack into here, then you could try someting in your potato.custom file* along the lines of:

package require sound

snack::sound customSoundFoo -load /path/to/foo.mp3
# Repeat for as many sound files as you want to use, with appropriate names in place of customSoundFoo; can do .wav or .mp3 among a few other lesser-used formats

proc playSound {snd} {
  # Stop any currently-playing sounds first
  snack::audio stop
  catch {$snd play}
}

Then, to trigger from an event:

/eval playSound customSoundFoo

* potato.custom is a text file you can put custom Tcl code in, path can be found with /eval file normalize $potato::path(custom)

Note: I haven't tested any of this, if you try it and have problems, let me know what error you get/what happens and I can try and debug.