Applescript in iCal

Question

I had an Applescript event that ran every night as an event in iCal that muted my speaker on my MacBook. It was followed in the morning by a similar Applescript iCal event that unmuted the speaker.  The reason for this is that I didn't want to hear Mail notifications and my date and time clock to announce the time every hour over night, but wanted them to work during the day.
The scripts were:
set volume with output muted
and
set volume without output muted
They were set in iCal as repeated events and under the Alert: Run Script portion to run a minute before the time I set for the event.
Since I've upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion, iCal does not do these scripts, so the sound remains either on or off depending on where it is at night. My computer is timed to shut itself off at night and on in the morning (after and before those scripts should activate)
Any suggestions as to how to get this to work.

Answer 1

Hi Dan,
To do this with Applescript is not as easy as it should be. Here is a script originally posted by Austin Kinsella1 a few years ago  (see Re: iCal Alarm - Pass Event data to AppleScript? ). I cannot check if it works on the current iCal, but I believe it will.  I would modify it to only look in the calendar I know the events will be in.
Best wishes
John M
called from iCal as on alarm, will speak the title of the alarm event
won't work for repeating events
AK ITCarlow Nov 2004
set Now to current date
-- Adjust FuzzSeconds to suit; if too big, close events will speak several times
set FuzzSeconds to 15
tell application "iCal"
          set MyEvents to every event of every calendar where ((start date of it) ≥ (current date))
          repeat with ThisEvent in MyEvents --scan the list looking for events that have triggered us
                    try
                              set MinutesBefore to (trigger interval of open file alarm of ThisEvent) as number
                              set TriggerInt to (Now - ((start date of ThisEvent) + 60 * MinutesBefore)) --notionally 0 for firing event
                              if (TriggerInt < FuzzSeconds) and (TriggerInt > (-FuzzSeconds)) then
                                        say (summary of ThisEvent as text) & " at " & (start date of ThisEvent as text)
  -- ThisEvent should a reference to the event,
  -- so you should be able to get the start date from it.
  -- You may want to do some checking first.
                              end if
                    end try
          end repeat
end tell