User-Configurable Pre-Announcement Chime

[WebMaximus]

Hi, hope you're doing well!

Following up on our previous chats, I wanted to run a small idea by you that I think could be a neat addition to Universal Announcer.

While cleaning up and structuring my airline announcement scripts, I realized it would be super handy to have a configurable pre-announcement chime option.

The Rationale

In real-world aviation, flight and cabin crew almost always trigger an acoustic cabin chime right before making a PA announcement to grab passengers' attention in a noisy cabin.

While doing this manually is tedious for static files, it becomes practically impossible when using dynamic announcements generated on-the-fly via text-to-speech, as there's no way to bake a chime into the resulting audio stream.

Proposed Implementation

It would be great if we could selectively enable a chime for specific announcements via a simple parameter—for example, a PlayChime: True tag (or a checkbox in the UI for each script).

Just a quick thought from a non-developer: I imagine this could probably be handled cleanly by simply triggering a local, pre-recorded chime file first, and then sequentially playing the generated TTS audio stream right after it finishes.

This would give us full control to automatically play the chime right before passenger-facing announcements (like boarding or descent updates) while keeping shorter or internal messages clean.

No rush on this at all, just thought I'd throw it out there. Keep up the great work with the tool!

Best regards,
Richard

[fearlessfrog]

It's a good idea. I might look at making it more generalized, as in allow the text templates to have a `##Play: instruction.

##Play: chime

The captain has now turned on the seatbelts sign.

..where the play target can be anything in the announcement folder, allowing you to build up a library of things and reusing them.

I would then put chime.ogg as an included default sound and that way people could do their own or even per airline if they wanted, sort of like the landing reactions.

So in theory you could even then vary things a little each time, e.g, use the new set number randomization option and do something like:

##Play: genericwelcome

Thanks for flying {AIRLINE_NAME}.

..that would first look for a match for any file in the airline folder called genericwelcome. It would respect the generation rules and look for a .txt file first to make the .ogg but if not found just use an existing sound file. The sound files could then be genericwelcome[1].ogg genericwelcome[2].ogg genericwelcome[3].ogg and it would just pick one to use (or if randomization off keep to the set number).

So it achieves what you are suggesting but also expands out how people can build templates in bits.

[WebMaximus]

Hi!

Thank you so much for a brilliant response and for taking the idea further—that implementation with the ##Play: instruction sounds like an absolute game-changer! It opens up so many great possibilities.

Also, since I have your attention, have you had any time to look into or think more about making it possible to disable Logo Light as a trigger for boarding? As mentioned, doing night flights with the current behavior can sometimes cause boardings to trigger unexpectedly when resetting the system if the logo lights are still on at the gate at night time.

It also cause a minor annoyance at start of a new flight at night where those of us now using SMOKE On as the trigger for boarding needs to remember to always use the trigger we chose before switching the Logo Light switch to ON.

This is the post I'm referring to and a simple toggle on the tweaks tab to disable Logo Light as a trigger would solve this completely.

#119 (comment)

Thanks again for all the fantastic work you put into this tool!

Best regards,
Richard