Matlab ambient busy sounds

Often, when I'm running a long computation in MATLAB, I direct my attention elsewhere while waiting for the computation to finish. But how can I tell when my computation is done? Obviously I can periodically check MATLAB, or I could spawn an empty figure at the end of my code, but these are inelegant solutions.

A nice feature of tea kettles and other physical devices is that they produce an audible signal while they operate. If MATLAB generated a non-obnoxious audio output while it was busy (something akin to the sound of boiling water, or a car engine), I could have an implicit indication of the status of my calculation.

Any ideas on how to implement a non-obnoxious ambient sound effect that only plays when MATLAB is busy?

Answer 1

[Udit Gupta]

There does not seem to be a solution for this from within matlab? When I am running long scripts, I usually put a sendmail entry at the end of it so I get an email notification on my phone. See http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/import_export/sending-email.html

However if you want to play a background sound you can issue a system call to VLC Media Player through the 'system' command in matlab. You can even program it to play your favorite playlist :-)

Simply use the command to begin playback at the beginning of your script and the command to stop playback at the end of it. Make sure to use the "\b" option to start it as a background process.

[Davis]

Udit,

I tried the sendmail solution. I think this works best for very long execution times, e.g. 30+ minutes. For something short, say 2-5m, I ended up with a clogged inbox.

I like the idea of using VLC, and I'll give that a shot, but the ideal solution would be an option in the MATLAB editor that didn't require me to add potentially conflicting code to my scripts.