I am willing to pay someone in Sono to produce an app to be able to sound on the hour and on the 1/2 hour of choosing various church Bells that would even stop the music for the on the hour church bell and 1/2 hour bell sound. I would even let sonos rent the app to make some monies . I live in the mountains and work outside and would love to know what time it is by listening to the church Bells.
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Custom program to sound church Bell on the hour
Best answer by Stanley_4
I’d suggest you get a Sonos device with an audio-in port and feed your music and bell sounds to it from another device that you can program to do as you wish. Something like a Raspberry Pi Zero would be more than adequate.
Sonos does offer a program interface but very few folks seem to be actively programming using it, I’d guess they won’t work cheap but it is an option too.
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I’d suggest you get a Sonos device with an audio-in port and feed your music and bell sounds to it from another device that you can program to do as you wish. Something like a Raspberry Pi Zero would be more than adequate.
Sonos does offer a program interface but very few folks seem to be actively programming using it, I’d guess they won’t work cheap but it is an option too.
Hello Stanley and thanks for your comments. Can you tell me how to contact the sonos program interface group, so I can fund someone willing to take this project on. I have over 20 sono speakers so I don’t want to hook up a device to one individual speaker. Maybe its better to find someone that could do an interface through Google music since I use this app to stream through the sono’s app. I really believe there is a market to develop an app that can be set up to play on the hour while listening to music through the sono speakers.
Blessings,
Peter D.
+22You could “almost” do this if you get an audio file of each of the bells for each hour and half hour. Then add them to named Sonos Playlists (obviously you need to add the audio files to My Music). Then set an alarm for each hour and half hour and select the relevant Playlist for each alarm. They will then play . Downside is whatever was playing will not re-start. If you always listen to the same radio sati you could then set another alarm after the bells to restart the radio.. Your alarm list would be quite clunky but it would possibly work for you
Which SONOS products are you using?
Hello Stanley and thanks for your comments. Can you tell me how to contact the sonos program interface group, so I can fund someone willing to take this project on.
Try here?
I have 12 sonos one speakers.
You could “almost” do this if you get an audio file of each of the bells for each hour and half hour. Then add them to named Sonos Playlists (obviously you need to add the audio files to My Music). Then set an alarm for each hour and half hour and select the relevant Playlist for each alarm. They will then play . Downside is whatever was playing will not re-start. If you always listen to the same radio sati you could then set another alarm after the bells to restart the radio.. Your alarm list would be quite clunky but it would possibly work for you
This seems to be a lot of set up and micromangaging. There must be someone that I can pay and market an app to work inside the sono app that works seamlessly without having to manually restart the playlist and there are times UNSCHEDULED that i dont want my muaic to retart by setting up scheduled times for the music to turn on aftwr the bell sounds. Can you tell me more about the Raspberry Pi Zero that might be the better solution that Stanley reply? Blessings Peter D
This will make everyone’s head spin a bit, but you could install a PORT, a cheap mixer, and some sort of ‘chime’ device. I have not researched what this ‘chime’ device might be. It could be Raspberry PI based or a finished product. The idea is that you could select music as you have been, and send it to PORT’s Line-Out, connected to a mixer input. The other mixer input is connected to the ‘chime’ device. Mixer output is connected to PORT’s Line-In. You would then play Line-In to your large Group.
Here’s a Raspberry Pi project. I’m not suggesting that you should do this, but you may know a nearby teen who could put this together in a few evenings.
The Pi has a lot of help available, programming it isn’t a good topic for the Sonos forums though. The Pi forums are excellent
Main Pi page: https://www.raspberrypi.org/
Pi scheduled tasks: https://raspberrytips.com/schedule-task-raspberry-pi/
Play sounds program: https://pypi.org/project/playsound/
Sound output options: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/how-to-play-sound-and-make-noise-with-your-raspberry-pi/
Getting really old-school here we had a 10” reel-to-reel tape deck that ran at 1 7/8 IPS and we recorded all our installation’s bugle calls on the tape, spaced out so that when started for Reveille it would get to the calls at the proper time. Stop and rewind after Taps and we were ready for the next day.
Today you could likely craft a compressible audio file to mimic the tape. Size would depend on how well the compression dealt with silence.
I don’t think this is the right approach to the feature. Sonoos speakers are designed to play a single track of audio at a time, and once you tell it to play something new, church bells for example, then it no longer can go back and play what it was playing previously. For example, if you were streaming Apple music, then programmatically told it to play some chimes via the Sonos API, the speaker could not go back and play Apple music where it left off.
The idea of using an aux source for the audio completely, for the chimes and music, would work, but you are limiting yourself to aux audio only, not really using the functionality of Sonos at all.
Why not use Alexa voice services for this? A Sonos speaker that has voice control on board can automatically dip it’s volume while Alexa speaks and then return to playing the same audio it played before. Find, or having someone create an Alexa skill that plays churchbells corresponding to the current time, and then have Alexa routines setup to periodically play the time on the hour. Or perhaps the skill will just return the time in churchbells on demand?
Honestly though, while I get that churchbells are neat and nostalgic, you can just ask Alexa (or Sonos Voice control) what time it is on demand without having to count the bells.
Hello Danny,
Thanks for your comments. Having church bells ring is not for just knowing what time it is but the experience of hearing church bells as thiugh you were in a european village in going back in time. I see that money cannot not always buy you what you want. No one has the vision like i do and seems that technology is limited unless someone with the gifting of programming and the passion to bring church bell.history to a technical world would want to take on a project like this. I will just keep asking my heavenly father to bring someone along side to help me with this project. I am sure if i was the CEO of Sonos that I could easily make this happen!
Blessings, Peter
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