I have a "whole-house" MPD/Snapcast music system, and decided to turn it into an alarm clock, so created these two scripts written in PHP to:
- Delete any snapcast streams that have gone stale (will be recreated on demand if needed)
- Turn off all speakers in the house except the bedroom
- Load and play a playlist named "Alarm"
- Revert settings (turn off the bedroom speakers, turn on selected speakers around the house)
All the scripts can run as a regular user, so no root privileges required. The requirements are simple enough:
- PHP (7.4 or better, untested with earlier versions) with Curl enabled
- A configured MPD/Snapcast multi-room audio system
Since the scripts are PHP, they are cross-platform.
The first script, alarm_set.php is run when you want the alarm to go off, and fulfills the function of turning off all the speakers around the house while ensuring the bedroom speakers are turned on, then clears the current queue, loads the alarm playlist and sets it to play.
The above script can be run on any machine that is running 24/7, but the two best choices would be either the bedroom device or the actual MPD/SnapcastServer machine. I use the bedroom machine. If you can set a cron job, this might be a typical cron entry:
# change the path to something appropriate. Runs at 8am every day
0 8 * * * /path/to/alarmset.php
The second script I run on my desktop machine. It's GNU/Linux Debian, and I power it down each night, so I run the script using the bootup macro in cron:
@reboot /path/to/script/alarm_reset.php
This script turns the bedroom speakers off (so the spiders can go back to sleep), and turns on any speakers defined in an array in the script.
I wrote the scripts for myself, but have made them as generic as possible. Invoking a playlist called "Alarm" has the benefit that you can change the contents of the playlist without having to change the scripts.
This setup allows occupants of your dwelling to listen to music through the early hours of the night, and nobody has to worry about making sure they turn speakers off before they go to sleep.
First off, if you are running on a unix-like system, you'll need to set the scripts to executable:
chmod +x alarm_set.php
Repeat for the other script, of course.
In the first line of each script is a hash-bang to the program required to run the script. For PHP:
#!/usr/bin/php
If PHP is not in the same location, please adjust accordingly.
Windows To run the scripts, you'll either have to call them thus:
> /path/to/php scriptname.php
... or ensure PHP is on the PATH environment variable.
end-of-windows-note
In alarm_set.php you'll find three constants you'll need to set as appropriate:
// set this to the name of the machine MPD/SnapServer are running on if not localhost
define("_MPD_HOST_", "127.0.0.1" );
// set this to the name of your alarm clock machine
// note that a hostname is required, you can't use localhost or 127.0.0.1
define("_ALARM_CLOCK_", "AlarmClock" );
define("__ALARM_PLAYLIST__", "Alarm" );
The __ALARM_PLAYLIST__ allows you to choose another playlist. Once setup, rather than changing the name of the playlist, it would be easier to change the contents.
In alarm_reset.php, change these variables as required:
// set this to the name of the machine MPD/SnapServer are running on if not localhost
define("_MPD_HOST_", "127.0.0.1" );
// set this to the name of your alarm clock machine
// note that a hostname is required, you can't use localhost or 127.0.0.1
define("_ALARM_CLOCK_", "AlarmClock" );
// list the machines you want to mute, all others will be unmuted
$mutables = array( _ALARM_CLOCK_ /*, "another_machine" */ );
For those new to scripting PHP, the bit between /* and */ is a comment. Removing those two markers makes the code between them active.
That's all there is to it. Good luck.
I've left debugging code in the php scripts. Set this constant to true to output debugging data:
//define("__DEBUG__", false);
At any point in the code you can call debug( "text to dump" ); to dump text to the screen - note you should invoke the script manually if you want to see the output. Alternately, you can change the debug() function to append to a file with file_put_contents( filename, "$t\n", FILE_APPEND );