BRON: PlaySound

Here’s a bit of trivia. BRON started off as a simple hourly chime app for BlackBerry 10. I found the ones in BlackBerry World to be somewhat lacking, so I set out to make my own. In the process of trying to figure out a good metaphore for setting the times to chime, I decided that my preferred method was to use a cron expression. Once that light bulb went off, BRON took on a new life.

However, I still also wanted a chime app that could play a sound at a specified time….

…so, BRON supports a special command to do just that.

In the brontab file, you can specify something like this (one or more times):

0 7-23 * *:PlaySound:Hourly Chimes

This will chime every hour on the hour between 07:00 to 23:00. You can set more than one if you like, just make the labels (and cron expressions) different.

The key here is the command field. the string “PlaySound” is a special internal command. If BRON finds this command, it will look for a file called “sound.mp3” in the bron/conf/ directory. You can copy any mp3 to this directory and rename it to “sound.mp3”. BRON comes with a default sound and a commented brontab entry. You can chose to enable it or not.