Straw Alarm

Sleep timer and music alarm for Linux — the AIMP "stop after / wake up with playlist" feature, for any MPRIS2 player.

If you searched for "AIMP alarm on Linux": this is that. Fall asleep to your music (playback stops after a timer or a number of tracks, with a gentle fade-out), and wake up to a different playlist at a set time, fading in from silence — all in your own music player.

Built for Strawberry, works with anything that speaks MPRIS2 (VLC, Elisa, Audacious, ...). Playlist switching uses the optional MPRIS Playlists interface — the alarm picks from the playlists already open in your player; on players without it, the alarm simply resumes playback.

Features

• Sleep timer: stop or pause after a duration (1h30m) or after N tracks (the fade-out is timed to end exactly with the last track)
• Alarm: at a given time (or after a duration), switch to one of the player's open playlists, set the volume, and play — relaunching the player first if you closed it
• Snooze: a button (and tray action) in the GUI; in the CLI just press Enter on a ringing alarm (or send SIGUSR1). Pauses the music and re-fires after a configurable interval (default 10 min)
• Recurring alarms: pick weekdays (GUI buttons or --days mon,wed,fri / weekdays / weekend / daily) and an alarm-only session re-arms itself after each firing
• Fades: smooth volume fade-out into sleep, fade-in from silence on wake; your original volume is restored after the sleep fade
• GUI and CLI: a small Qt app that follows your desktop theme (looks native on KDE Plasma), plus a scriptable command line
• System tray: closing the window while a timer is armed hides the app to the tray, where it keeps counting down (tooltip shows the remaining time; right-click to cancel or quit)
• Suspend-aware: blocks system sleep while your music plays (logind inhibitor), releases the block when it stops — optionally suspending the PC right away — and programs an RTC wake a few minutes before the alarm so a suspended machine wakes up for it (via KDE PowerDevil's scheduleWakeup, no root needed; rtcwake fallback elsewhere). After the alarm it keeps the system awake for a configurable window (default 30 min) so it doesn't doze off mid-morning-playlist.
• Remembers your setup: the GUI restores all last-used values on launch, so re-arming your usual night is just pressing Start
• Survives crashes: armed sessions persist to disk; after a crash, logout or reboot, strawalarm offers one-click re-arm with the correct remaining time (or tells you explicitly that an alarm was missed). With "Start with the desktop" enabled, recurring alarms restore themselves at login with zero interaction
• Remote control: the GUI exposes a D-Bus service; strawalarm arm|snooze|cancel|status control it from any shell — wire those into KDE Connect's "Run commands" plugin and you can arm, snooze or stop the alarm from your phone (see below)
• Optional background daemon: enable strawalarmd.service and armed sessions live outside the GUI — they survive closing the window, GUI crashes, and (via systemd restart + the armed-state file) even a crash of the daemon itself. The GUI automatically shows and controls whatever the daemon has armed. Without the daemon everything still works in-process.
• Native D-Bus (PyGObject/Gio) for everything — player control, logind inhibitors, RTC scheduling, notifications; zero subprocess churn during a session. Falls back to playerctl/busctl automatically where PyGObject is missing (STRAWALARM_LEGACY_TRANSPORT=1 forces the fallback).

Requirements

• Linux with systemd; python3-gobject (PyGObject) for native D-Bus — present on virtually every desktop; without it, strawalarm falls back to playerctl + busctl
• Python ≥ 3.10; PySide6 for the GUI
• An MPRIS2-capable player

Fedora: sudo dnf install python3-gobject python3-pyside6 Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install python3-gi python3-pyside6

Install

From a checkout — puts strawalarm/strawalarm-gui in ~/.local/bin and adds a launcher ("Straw Alarm") to your application menu:

./install.sh

Or from PyPI: pipx install "strawalarm[gui]" (then copy data/strawalarm.desktop and the icon yourself if you want the menu entry). Fedora users can also use COPR: dnf copr enable tengro/strawalarm && dnf install strawalarm.

Background daemon (recommended)

systemctl --user enable --now strawalarmd.service   # unit installed by install.sh

With the daemon running, arming from the GUI, CLI or phone hands the session to strawalarmd: close the window, crash the GUI, even kill -9 the daemon — systemd restarts it and it re-arms itself from the persisted state. The GUI becomes a live monitor/remote for whatever the daemon has armed.

Usage

GUI: launch Straw Alarm from your app menu, or strawalarm gui.

CLI:

strawalarm list                    # running players + their open playlists

# Sleep timer
strawalarm sleep 1h30m --fade 30           # stop in 1h30m, fade the last 30s
strawalarm sleep --tracks 5 --fade 20      # 5 tracks, fade ending with track 5
strawalarm sleep 1h --pause                # pause instead of stop

# Alarm
strawalarm wake 07:30 --playlist Morning --volume 40 --fade-in 60
strawalarm wake +8h --playlist Morning     # relative time
strawalarm wake 07:30 --playlist Morning --days weekdays  # recurring
# while it rings: press Enter to snooze (--snooze MIN, default 10)

# The full night in one command: fade out in 45 min, suspend the PC,
# wake it at 07:27, fade the Morning playlist in at 07:30
strawalarm sleep 45m --fade 30 --suspend --wake 07:30 --playlist Morning \
          --volume 40 --fade-in 60

Durations: 1h30m, 90m, 45s, 01:30:00, or bare minutes. Playlist names match case-insensitively (exact, then unique substring). With several players running, pick one with --player NAME.

The CLI runs in the foreground (Ctrl+C cancels). To detach: systemd-run --user strawalarm wake 07:30 --playlist Morning.

Remote control (phone via KDE Connect)

With the GUI running (or hidden in the tray), these work from any shell — they talk to it over D-Bus:

strawalarm arm      # arm with the GUI's saved settings
strawalarm status   # e.g. "Alarm in 7:59:12"
strawalarm snooze   # snooze a ringing alarm
strawalarm cancel   # cancel the armed timer/alarm

To get buttons on your phone: KDE Connect settings → your phone → Run commands plugin → add commands like

They then appear in the phone app under "Run command" (and on Android as quick-tile/lock-screen shortcuts) — snooze from bed achieved. Starting the GUI twice is safe: the second instance just raises the first one's window.

Notes / known limits

• Wake-from-suspend needs KDE PowerDevil (any Plasma desktop) or a root-capable rtcwake; without either, the alarm still works but can't wake a suspended machine. Hibernation is untested.

• PowerDevil needs CAP_WAKE_ALARM to arm the RTC, and some distros (Fedora 44, at least) ship the binary without it — the scheduleWakeup API then silently does nothing. Worse, a manual setcap fix is wiped by every PowerDevil package update. strawalarm detects the missing capability and warns when you arm the alarm. Permanent fix (installs systemd units that re-apply the capability at boot and immediately after updates):

  sudo contrib/install-powerdevil-caps.sh
  # then, as your normal user — NOT inside the sudo/root shell:
  systemctl --user restart plasma-powerdevil.service
  

  (Running the restart in a root shell starts a sessionless PowerDevil under root's user manager, which crash-loops with a scary but harmless "dumped core" message — your desktop's instance is unaffected.)

• While the sleep timer plays, only suspend is blocked — the screen still dims and switches off on your normal schedule. Your desktop's battery/energy widget will truthfully show "Straw Alarm is preventing sleep".

• If the alarm fires the moment the machine resumes (e.g. the RTC wake was late or missing), strawalarm waits ~12 s for the audio stack to settle and then watches playback for the first minute, restarting the player if it choked on a half-initialized audio device.

• All timers use absolute wall-clock deadlines, so suspend/resume needs no special handling — the countdown is simply correct when the machine wakes up.

• Volume control is the player's own volume, not the system mixer.

• Without --fade, --tracks N stops the instant track N+1 starts, so you may hear a sub-second blip; with a fade it ends cleanly.

Reporting bugs

Every session is logged to ~/.local/state/strawalarm/strawalarm.log (rotated, 3 × 1 MB) by both the GUI and the CLI. Please attach the relevant lines to bug reports — especially for "the alarm didn't fire" issues, the log usually names the culprit directly.

Project direction

Where this is headed — phases, risks, design sketches and the decision log — lives in ROADMAP.md. Publishing/packaging plans are in PUBLISHING.md.

License

MIT