Chimer Macro (v10.2)

One my filial duties is to wind Mom's Sligh grandfather clock every Wednesday. A recent discussion on the forum about creating a macro to chime on the hour inspired me to come up with this macro.

In brief, it uses a cron trigger to chime on the hour and optionally ring once for each hour with options to ring for each quarter hour. All the options are active as distributed.

INSTALLATION

The macro plays up to five different audio files. The five included here were all cut from a single Clock Shop audio file. You can use all five or just one or something entirely different, up to you. The macro doesn't care.

Just copy the audio files you want to use to ~/Library/Sounds where they will immediately be accessible in the Play Sound action popup for each option.

CONFIGURATION

As distributed, the macro will chime Monday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. on the quarter hour.

In cron that's: */15 8-23 * * MON-SAT

You may wish some other schedule. If so, http://crontab.guru is your friend.

For example, if you wish to avoid quarterly chimes, you would change just the cron to run as: 0 8-23 * * MON-SAT

If you want to silence the tolling of the hour, just disable the Repeat action in the first Switch action's section.

DEFAULTS

This version will play the Westminster chime on the hour, chiming for each hour immediately after. On the first quarter hour, it will chime once. On the half hour, twice. On the three-quarter hour, three times.

The quarter hour chimes are cuts of the hour tune, not repetitions of the single bong. That's just the way I edited my sound files.

Downloads for fuller quarter hour chiming are available. In fact, there is a wealth of free mp3 chime audio files available that his macro can tap into unedited.

CONCLUSION

I find the chiming to actually be productive, reminding me more time is passing than I realized. Tempus fugit, after all.

I started with just the Westminster chime on the hour but embellished it to this version without finding it the least bit annoying.

A MacBook Pro costs about as much as a grandfather clock but doesn't need winding. And if you ever get tired of the chime, there's a lot of options.

Enjoy!

Chimer.kmmacros (6.4 KB)

Chimer Chimes.zip (780.4 KB)

Keyboard Maestro Export

3 Likes

Nice! I like it. Simple and useful.

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I find the chiming to be productive as well. I only want hourly chime and I like the retro chime of the Casio H104 so I modified what you shared and I'm loving it. Thanks for sharing.

casio-h104-chime.mp3.zip (15.3 KB)
Chimer - Casio H104.kmmacros (33.6 KB)

1 Like