music_player.md

This is a quick and fun project utilizing a Raspberry Pi (or any other Linux-based server) to play a portion of a song out of connected speakers at a particular time interval.

Step 1: Download an .mp3 of a song that you want to play. For this project

I downloaded Crab Rave, but any song will work for this.

Step 2: Download the SoX cli media player.

On Debian

sudo apt install sox

Step 3: Write a short script to play a portion of the song that you want to play

#!/bin/sh

play /home/USERNAME/Music/crab_rave.mp3 trim 01:10 fade 3 15 3 norm

The above code using SoX to play crab_rave.mp3 for 15 seconds from 01:10 and will also fade in for 3 seconds, and fade out for 3 seconds.

Step 4: Playing the song can then be automated using systemd services and timers.

As root:

• Create and edit a service file, /usr/lib/systemd/system/rave.service

Description=Play Crab Rave

[Service]
ExecStart=sh /home/USER/Music/rave.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

• Create and edit a timer file, /usr/lib/systemd/system/rave.timer

[Unit]
Description=Plays crab rave every 6 hours

[Timer]
OnCalendar=0/6:00:00

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

This timer will play the song every 6 hours from system startup

Step 5: Enable the timer

sudo systemctl enable rave.timer

sudo systemctl start rave.timer

You can check on the timer by using sudo systemctl list-timers command

Step 6: Hook your Pi to an audio device and that's it! Your song will now play every six hours.

I personally use this as an alarm for my Pacman Frog automatic water mister, but I am sure there are some other cool uses for this.