Thursday, January 31, 2008

VLC Automated Net Stream

I managed three hours of dreamland (deep sleep actually/probably) and I slept for a ~hour.75 nap that evening and crashed again just after midnight. I wanted to continue this sort-of ubermensh sleep system and I'd been using windows task scheduler to automate a playlist for my alarm. But I heard some days before a collegue listening to npr in the middle of the day when the local station is usually blasting yuppy drivel (you know, Yanni-cheap classical-quick-turn it off kinda CRAP,) so I thought to maybe wakeup to something dreamy, tenuous, long-range faintly connected to the world like bbc early morning report by using the statewide npr net cast.

I found at their page three streams, wmv, mp3, and aac, the latter of which is basically high def audio; nice. It opened befault in vlc, which along with media player classic thoroughly satisfy my every perceptual need, and so I thought perhaps to automate that as my alarm. VLC can be run from the command line with lots of switches, it turns out, and so I made a batch file:

cd "c:\program files\videolan\vlc"
start vlc.exe http://www.*.org/listen/live_newsinfo_aac.pls

and alarmed it via task scheduler. All to no avail, in any case, since I sheduled it for 4:50 PM, it does work just fine otherwise, the aac better sounding than FM. Wake well and good dreams.