libcanberra is a library to play event sounds on Linux desktops.

This repository hosts the node.js bindings to it, which allows using libcanberra from node.js applications (such as electron or node-webkit apps, but also plain node).

This package contains tiny, idiomatic JavaScript bindings. For the details of each API, see the libcanberra documentation.

const canberra = require('canberra')

const ctx = new canberra.Context({
    [canberra.Property.APPLICATION_NAME]: 'my test app',
    [canberra.Property.APPLICATION_VERSION]: '1.0.0',
});

Properties passed to the context constructor are optional. They are used to match a sound to an application, for example to allow the user to disable all sounds from a certain app.

ctx.play(0, {
    [canberra.Property.EVENT_ID]: 'bell'
});

The first argument is a numeric ID of your choice. You can pass the same ID to ctx.playing(id) to check if the sound is still playing or not, and to ctx.cancel(id) to stop playing. If you reuse the ID, a call to ctx.cancel(id) will cancel all instances.

The second argument describes what sound to play, as libcanberra properties. Most likely, you will want to set canberra.Property.EVENT_ID to the name of a sound in the sound theme.

The play() API returns a promise that will be fulfilled when the sound has completed playing.

ctx.cache({
    [canberra.Property.EVENT_ID]: 'bell'
});

To reduce latency caused by disk access and decompression, you can cache sounds in the sound server (Pulseaudio, usually). The arguments are the same as play().

All APIs except play() are synchronous, and will throw an error on failure (such as file not found, or Pulseaudio server not available). The error will have the code property set to the libcanberra error code, which is exposed as canberra.Error by this package.

play() is asynchronous and will return a promise; the promise will be rejected with the same error format on failure.

ctx.destroy()

ctx.destroy() MUST be called to cleanup resources when done. Otherwise the node.js process will not terminate, and memory or file descriptors will be leaked.