RSS Audio alert?

February 19, 2009 5:46 PM

Can anyone recommend an RSS reader that can be configured to issue an audio alert when a feed updates with a new item?
posted by beagle to technology (7 comments total)

What platform? (Win/Linux/Mac)

If it's linux (or mac), this could be done fairly easily with a shell script and wget.
posted by chrisamiller at 5:58 PM on February 19

Actually, answers for any platform appreciated.
posted by beagle at 6:00 PM on February 19

NewsFire, for Mac OS X.

The developer's famously pompous, but it's a fantastic app; I wholeheartedly recommend it.
posted by trotter at 6:14 PM on February 19

You can set up an RSS-to-SMS alert with Pingie, and let your phone notify you of updates.
posted by CRM114 at 6:20 PM on February 19

Apple Mail might do this for you. That is, it treats RSS feeds as another "mailbox", so I assume that it uses the same new mail notification, but I have not actually verified this.
posted by larsks at 7:12 PM on February 19

I'd probably do it like this in Linux:

- use wget to pull down the xml

- use Ruby and hpricot to parse the XML and look for changes If there's a change, trigger a system sound in one of a few ways:

    a) just do a system beep (something like perl -e 'print "\007"' should work)

    b) fire off one of the many command-line audio players (maybe mplayer) and have it play some sound file on my computer

Wrap the whole thing in a shell script, and have cron run it once an hour.


Of course, this presupposes that you like monkeying around with this kind of stuff.
posted by chrisamiller at 9:40 PM on February 19

I'd probably do it like this in Linux (or Windows for that matter):
- Install rss2email [self-link]
- Turn the new email chime on your mail client
posted by turbodog at 8:12 AM on February 20