Linux @lemmy.ml Communist @lemmy.ml 7 mo. ago

Does anyone know how to execute a script when a certain sound plays?

I have a dumb work related chrome thing, i'd like to make it so that when a certain notification sound plays in chromium, my computer does a few things automatically for me

Does anyone know a good way to make this happen?

I imagine it'd have to be setup like:

when chrome starts playing audio && check if that audio matches soundfile.ogg && myscript.sh, but I don't know any good cli utilities that could get something like that done, and if there are any better ideas!

edit: to avoid X/Y issues i've summarized the problem in full here:

I have a work program, this notifies me if I get a call or email, the work program then presents an accept/decline page, and does not proceed until I either accept, decline, or it times out.
I want it to do two different things depending on if it's a call or email
It provides no notification other than the sound and an "accept" button on the page
I have a chrome window open that does nothing but this, and I never use chrome for anything else
I want to automatically do various things when I receive either this call or email
I want it to be broadly applicable rather than a script designed for the specific website giving me the notification (so not a chrome extension). This prevents me from having to update any code in the event that the backend changes dramatically, and even if the notification sound changes, i'd just record a new sound as the activation noise.
The noise is always the same, and hasn't changed for many years, and there is a distinct noise between calls and emails
They never overlap, they never play multiple times at the same time, and they never make any noises other than those two. The noises are distinct.

These factors cause me to want to run a script once the noise is recognized, only if the noise is playing in a particular app. I'm using pipewire/hyprland on arch.

My current plan for isolating the noise is to do the following:

pactl load-module module-combine-sink sink_name='Work' slaves='easyeffects_sink'

and then set chrome exclusively to play audio on work.

Then set a script to check the sink work for audio that matches what I want. That should be simpler than the other methods i've seen to isolate the noise.

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67 comments

I think sox is what you want

I went ahead and asked a free AI how to use sox and played audio to trigger a script. Probably won't be 100% accurate but maybe send you down the right path. Good luck.

Install 'sox' if you haven't already. You can use the package manager of your Linux distribution to install it.

Open a terminal and use the 'rec' command from 'sox' to continuously listen to the audio input:

sox -d -t .wav - silence 1 0.1 3% 1 1.0 3%

This command will listen for audio and create a .wav file when it detects sound.

Write a script that will be triggered when a sound is detected. For example, you can create a script called "myscript.sh" with the following content:

#!/bin/bash echo "Sound detected! Running my script." # Add your desired actions here

Make the script executable by running the following command in the terminal:

chmod +x myscript.sh

Use the 'rec' command along with the 'play' command from 'sox' to continuously listen for sound and execute your script when sound is detected:

sox -d -t .wav - silence 1 0.1 3% 1 1.0 3% | while read -r; do ./myscript.sh; done

This command will continuously listen for sound and execute your script each time sound is detected.

Remember to customize the script "myscript.sh" with your desired actions.
- How would this not just trigger from any sound rather one specific?

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