It is easy to set up a simple CRON job to run a sound on the top of the hour by running aplay on a Linux machine. Something like this would also work on a Mac with minor changes, afplay is the default command line player for Mac, CRON works the same. For Windows, I have not tried it but task scheduler, every hour and there must be some easy command line program out there to fire off, that stuff has been around since DOS.
aplay
aplay works with wave files so you can use oggdec to convert ogg files to wav. A lot of sound theme files come in ogg or wav. aplay and mplayer come installed in Ubuntu at least by default in 14.04 LTS, which I am running. If not a simple…
sudo apt-get install aplay
…or…
sudo apt-get install mplayer
…will get them installed.
oggdec
Oggdec is part of a very small install package, takes seconds to install.
To install…
sudo apt-get install vorbis-tools
To convert OGG ausio file to a WAV audio file…
oggdec filename.ogg
Sound Themes
The sound themes are located at /usr/share/sounds . If you go there and try out the sounds you might find one that sounds good to you for an hourly chime.
Two level tree of /usr/share/sounds, using the tree command. If you don’t have it get in a few seconds using…
sudo apt-get install tree
Output of tree command show 2 levels below /usr/share/sounds
(tree /usr/share/sounds -d -L 2)
/usr/share/sounds
├── alsa
│ ├── Front_Center.wav
│ ├── Front_Left.wav
│ ├── Front_Right.wav
│ ├── Noise.wav
│ ├── Rear_Center.wav
│ ├── Rear_Left.wav
│ ├── Rear_Right.wav
│ ├── Side_Left.wav
│ └── Side_Right.wav
├── fLight__2.0
│ ├── Copyright
│ ├── index.theme
│ └── stereo
├── freedesktop
│ ├── index.theme
│ └── stereo
├── Fresh_and_CLean
Sound Theme Downloads
I went to a site see link below and downloaded two sound themes (fLight 2.0 and Fresh and Clean, the third one on the site was a dead link ) and tried out the sounds. I found that the Message sound in the fLight 2.0 theme was a pleasant but catchy enough sound to be heard at a distance and over any music I might be playing at the time the CRON job runs.
http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2010/08/3-awesome-sound-themes-for-ubuntu.html
The CRON job that runs to do the hourly sound is..
00 09-23 * * * aplay /usr/share/sounds/fLight__2.0/stereo/Message.wav
It will produce a sound from 9AM to 11PM and uses the Message.wav which I converted from an ogg to a wav file…
I have attached the Message.wav below for your listening pleasure!
So far I have not switched my overall sound theme from the Ubuntu default, but I might try out the two themes that I have downloaded for variety.