Help using crontab to play a sound

As per this answer: Can I use cron to chime at top of hour like a grandfather clock? you need to export an environment variable before playing sounds in your cron script:

export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR="/run/user/1000"

So rather than calling your music player directly, call a script name in crontab like this:

0 1,13 * * * /home/ME/bin/big-ben.sh /home/ME/bin/bigben/Clock_Chime_01.ogg >/dev/null 2>&1 # JOB_ID_75
    (... SNIP ...)
45 0-23 * * * /home/ME/bin/big-ben.sh /home/ME/bin/bigben/Clock_Chime_15-3.ogg >/dev/null 2>&1

• Replace ME with your user name.
• You had an error (the spaces after /bigben and before /Clock on in the last line of your crontab. I've fixed the error above.
• You were using ~/ shortcut for /home/ME which cron doesn't like. Use full path names in cron.

Then create your /usr/local/bin/big-ben.sh script:

#!/bin/bash
export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR="/run/user/1000"
mplayer -really-quiet "$1" -volume 100

• "$1" is the parameter 1 passed by crontab entry to your script

Remember to mark the script executable by using:

chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/big-ben.sh