Can I buy something that plays MP3s on a regular schedule?

October 5, 2022 10:13 AM

I'm looking for a device that can play audio files on a predefined schedule with no interaction, like you would find in some kinds of public sound installations. Is there something that I can buy off-the-shelf that will do this?

I'm helping to create a spooky story tree, which will read a (different) spooky story once or twice an hour for the week leading up to haloween. We're going to hide speakers in a particular tree and make it known that stories begin every half hour from 5:00-10:00pm (at 5:00, 5:30, 6:00, 6:30, and so on).

Ideally, I'd like to provide a folder (or playlist) full of MP3 or other audio files, one story per file, and have the device play them in order, at the predefined times. I know that I can write some scripts to do this with a Raspberry Pi (and that may be the route that I take), but is there an MP3 player or other off-the-shelf device that can do this already?

posted by toxic to Technology (7 answers total)

Probably a phone will do it, if you have an old one lying around? On my iPhone I can set any sound/song in the device's music library to be played back as an alarm. Use the Music app to get your stories into the music library, then set a bunch of alarms with the stories you want as needed.
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:24 AM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

You could also create one very long audio file that has the stories placed every thirty minutes. Any audio editor software can do that. Audacity is free. Then you only need to trigger it once.
posted by jonathanhughes at 11:39 AM on October 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

It's kind of overkill but a Brightsign player can be set up to play a collection of audio files on a schedule, and it has a pretty nice scripting system (my experience is with the legacy BrightAuthor software and not the BrightAuthor:connected one). If you have it on ethernet you can even update content remotely. I've linked to the basic LS424 model above; if you wanted to do different things like button triggers you could get the HD424 which has a customizable GPIO block.

That said it is $295 ($249 on Amazon) and you will also need their proprietary $8 USB-C to analog audio adapter and a micro SD card, so it might be more efficient to just ("just") do scripting on a Pi.
posted by implied_otter at 12:23 PM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

A Pi is perfect for this! Name your MP3 files with numbers, and then use the digits of the time to pick which MP3 to play. A cron job can run every half hour to look up the time and play the appropriate music file.

I mean, if you can find a Pi for sale anywhere, that is... :7(

(If you are totally hosed, I might be able to loan you one by mail or something.)
posted by wenestvedt at 1:06 PM on October 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

I was also going to mention Brightsign. I mean, I think there are probably cheaper solutions, but that's one I know about.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 2:17 PM on October 5, 2022

If the distance is not TOO far from your house, a wireless speaker linked to an audio source in your house may do it. Then you can just program it from your PC if it has Bluetooth. Windows Scheduler is built-in. Even easier if you want to run a power extension that way.
posted by kschang at 2:40 PM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Just use mp3s with no sound in-between and play a playlist on repeat.
posted by turkeyphant at 6:35 PM on October 5, 2022