I've been trying to use Scheduled Tasks and mplayer as an alarm clock, scheduling mplayer /path/to/file.mp3 for my morning wakeup time, but whenever it reaches the scheduled time, mplayer freezes only a few seconds into the MP3. System Monitor indicates that it's still running and taking up most of a CPU core, it's just not playing audio.
The weird thing is that when I select "Run selected task," it goes just fine. (And in a terminal, which might be related.) It just doesn't work when it's running as a scheduled thing, whether it's as a recurring or one-time task. So it has to have something to do with the scheduler itself, and I don't know much about cron. What gives?
mplayeris quite verbose with it's output? Try commanding it to be quiet, or redirecting it's output to /dev/null – Adrian Apr 3 '12 at 17:39