At home, we use Logitech Squeezeboxes for all our listening pleasures, including our bedroom where we use the alarm function to wake us up in the morning. The alarm has never been outstanding (a few years ago, a separate plugin was necessary to get reasonable functionality) and although it’s improved in fits and starts over the years, it’s still not a paragon of outstanding design.
For us, the worst problem is that the length of time the squeezebox plays for after the alarm has been triggered is restricted to 90 minutes or less (you can have it play indefinitely, but if you want it to switch itself off at all, 90 minutes is the cut-off). As the Today programme is on for two hours after we wish to be woken up, two hours is the time I want the alarm to last for.
It turns out the restriction is purely down to the user interface and not a limitation of the system itself. I seem to recall posting a feature request for the slider to become logarithmic, which would allow fine control at the 5 / 10 minute end of the scale and longer periods at the other, but it’s never been implemented. I can’t really complain: it’s open source so I should have done it myself. One reason I haven’t is that it’s relatively easy to get around just by editing the relevant prefs file.
On my Ubuntu system, this is /var/lib/squeezeboxserver/prefs/server.prefs; Windows users will probably find it in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Squeezebox\prefs\server.prefs (according to Logitech's documentation, although newer Windows versions may have a slightly different path). It seems wise to stop the server while you make your edits: I found that changes can occasionally be overwritten.
The section for each player is headed by its MAC address (look in the "Player" tab of the settings pages of the web interface: it's listed in the "Basic Settings" section). Incidentally, the all-zeros MAC address at the start of the file is used as a template when new players are added. Skip through all the _ts stuff and you’ll find several entries starting “alarm”. As you might guess, alarmTimeoutSeconds is the value of interest and this needs to be set accordingly. There are 3600 seconds in an hour, so I have 7200 set. Save, restart the server and you’re done.
A couple of notes. Firstly, this is obviously only applicable to those running Logitech Media Server* at home: if your alarm is set using Logitech’s online system (MySqueezebox.com*) you’re out of luck. I have no idea how the online system works and it may not be subject to the same restrictions anyway. Secondly, be careful about changing the settings using the web interface afterwards – the UI pages will obviously overwrite what’s in the prefs file and you may need to reset the timeout value if you change anything else on the alarm page (other settings changes are fine). As a result, if you edit your alarm times frequently, you may find this process is not worth the trouble.
You can set the alarm time here too (“alarms: <number>: _time”), which makes things easier if you don’t want to disturb the timeout you’ve set, but you will need to calculate the time you’re after in seconds form midnight if you do.
* Correct this week, but nomenclature changes frequently.
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