Podcasting Hacks

Build a Simple Sound Cart for Windows

Using ActiveState Perl on Windows, you can build a quick cart program to play WAV files on demand.

ActiveState Perl comes with Tk (see http://www.tcl.tk/) support built in for creating reasonably good-looking Windows interfaces quickly. It also comes with the Win32::Sound module [Hack #7] , which makes it simple to play WAV files with a single command. So, I figured I would take these two packages and slap them together to make a simple Windows sound cart program. The result is this script.

The Code

Save this file as perlcart.pl:

       use Tk;
       use Tk::Button;
       use DirHandle;
       use Win32::Sound;
       use strict;

       sub play($) { Win32::Sound::Play( $_[0] ); } 

       my $main = new MainWindow();

       my $dh = new DirHandle( "." );
       while( my $filename = $dh->read() )
       {
              next unless $filename =~ /[.]wav$/i;
              my $buttonname = $filename;
              $buttonname =~ s/[.]wav$//i;
              my $button = $main->Button( -text => $buttonname,          
            -command => sub { play( $filename ); } );
              $button->pack( -fill => "x", -padx => 2, -pady => 2 );
       }

       MainLoop;

Running the Hack

Add a couple of .wav files to the directory where you placed perlcart.pl. Then run this command:

       C:\> perl perlcart.pl

It doesn’t come a whole lot simpler than this. I create the main window, then iterate through the files in the current directory looking for .wav files. Each time I find one, I add a new button with a command handler that will play the file using the play subroutine. I then pack the button into the main window, which is Tk’s simplest ...