Can you make it so we can choose the songs or playlists to play as well as setting the times
Yes... I'm thinking it will have as many wake-up times ("Alarms") as you want, each with its own set of parameters and Playlists - and potentially, individually selected songs.
I am writing anyother plug-in where I only select Playlists (or Smartlists, of course). If AlarmClock is to let you select individual songs, we have to presume it could be a few hundred or thousand. That much information has to be written to a file instead of the Registry, probably storing the whole path and file name. If you have a couple thousand songs it will take a few seconds to read in the song list when you select an Alarm. Since I have the Playlist-based code working and debugged, let's start with Playlists only and see how it feels.
One thing I know *I* want: the Alarms and Sleep Timer need to keep track of what song is playing in each playlist. I like to have LOTS of random tracks that I hear over time. When a Playlist is queued up into Playing Now, it's going to be queued starting where it left off.
Since you'll be able to select more than one Playlist per Alarm (and for the Sleep Timer), when anything starts it should see what the most recently playing Playlist was. If it's one that is in the collection for the new Alarm, it will start within it at the correct position. If the most recent Alarm and the new one don't have a Playlist in common, the new Alarm will use its own most recent Playlist and position.
Hmmm... I thought that "Playing Now" should be included as a selectable Playlist at some point, but that has dangers. If you have Images in Playing Now, you won't hear anything and will oversleep. I shouldn't let that happen - an unreliable alarm is useless. .... Oops, a Smartlist could end up empty without the user knowing it. AlarmClock had better make sure that SOMETHING is playing when it comes on, even if it has to just start at the beginning of the Music Library.
I guess that it would be nice to be able to select the Television, as well. There's currently no provision for it in the API and putting it in is really a project - not a quickie. AlarmClock will be music-only for now.
It would be nice to have an Alarm have an Image List also, and cycle through them Slideshow-style during the alarm. Future feature.
This is the Playlist Selection tree:
As I think about the design, it might be cool if each Alarm optionally made its own list with all the songs in each Playlist "interweaved" in some way, rather than moving from one list to another. It would save this Alarm Playlist and only change its order when you tell it to, and keep track of its position. Something to talk/think about. Re-inventing the wheel, perhaps? You could actually accomplish the same thing using a single Playlist or Smartlist designed for the purpose.
Well, please post your thoughts. This is a starting point.
Randy
Author
Topic: Alarm Clock (Read 3486 times)