Teacher looking for solutions

[nbarten]

Hey everyone, longtime lurker... finally making an account to get a helpful solution.

 

I'm a middle school teacher.  I love to play music in my classroom during the time when students are passing from one classroom to another.  The problem is that I'm forgetful and often am busy speaking to students during that time.  Is there a program that could simply schedule my computer to play music for 6 minutes at a time 8 times per day.  I've found solutions to start music using the Windows scheduler program, but have found that to be cumbersome in practice and I'm far from a "power-user."  I don't mind having to start a program at the beginning of the day, but would prefer if the program would be automatic.  The workstation I use in my classroom runs Windows 7.  Any help the community can give would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks a ton!

 

Nathan Barten

Medical Science

Cambridge Middle School

Cambridge, MN

[WereCatf]

Sounds too much like a niche-thing for there to exist any good premade-solution, or at least I can't think of anything good for what you have in mind. I'm tempted to tell you to learn Python and then have the Python-script call e.g. VLC to play the music-files, but since you're not a power-user, that might be a wee bit too much work on top of your job. Another option would be to get one of us who already are familiar with Python or similar languages to whip you up something (not me, though; I'm already a bit overloaded even as-is, so I'd want some small compensation)

 

EDIT: Just making a playlist in Winamp and an Autohotkey-script that sends multimedia-keys on a schedule to Winamp might be a better approach.

[nbarten]

Thanks for your reply, WereCatf.  That's what I was afraid of...

 

Though I'd be really excited to learn Python (or any other programming language for that matter), I'm thinking I wouldn't be able to figure this out quickly enough to make it feasible in my classrooms.  So much of my time is spent dealing with other things already.  Maybe I'll start playing around, however, to see what I can make happen.  I suppose if I were to make it that way, I could use the same sort of script to call up any program at any time?  There are plenty of other programs I use at regular intervals.  This could be helpful.  

 

Any help from the community would be amazing.  I know there are a number of other teachers, just in my school that would make use of this sort of thing.  Anyone in the community willing to take this on? 

 

Thanks for the consideration, everyone!

[homeap5]

Lot of calendars or organizers have option to run program at specific time. Rainlendar for example. And players like FooBar or Aimp have command line functions, so its possible to stop them too using bat.

[FlappyBoobs]

How about make a collaboration project with one of the tech faculties? a timer is too inaccurate (you may need an extra minute of talking time but the music could start as you are speaking), but you could maybe us a sensor of some kind (movement, timer plus sound if there is a bell) to detect the end of the lesson and start the music. You could achieve this with an arduino or rasberry pi.  It would be a great project for people to learn about how to program on an arduino and the material costs are not at all expensive. (maybe offer it as an extra credit project or something) You could even link it up to the lights and things, which could be a cool way to end the lesson with music and mood lighting!

[myselfolli]

If you really need a quick and dirty solution, I might be able to throw something together. Hit me up if you're interested

[nbarten]

Thanks, myselfolli.  I'll give Winamp or Rainlender a try first.  These computers are limited by system administrators, so I can't just go installing things willie nillie, but I'll try those on my home computer to see how I like those solutions.

 

Thanks again,

 

NB

[Shoe_Eater]

i personally dont see many reasons as to why you would do this instead of just using normal music software, but you would beable to try doing it using python, and this would allow you to program in when exactly you want it to trigger and exactly what you want it to do.