Yes, this is quite a problem.

My N900 has this twitch where it sometimes kills audio after a short wile while in an alarm. It sits on my desk, it goes riiiing then nothing. UI looks like it rings, but it does not.

Since the alarm is modal, all my subsequent alarms either que ot get passed by.

I was thinking about a Queen beecon widget but it is quite the overhead and it might not always refresh.

I could live with a daemon if it does really work. I was thinking a mplayer call to play audio or video, Q quits it and maybe the software could check if the entire song was played, e.g. if mplayer ran over 30 seconds.