I've been a longtime hamvoip user and recently switched over to asl3 on a pi4. I had ARN and ARRL news working great on the hamvoip iteration. Put everything in place on ASL3 and used your modes above for the ramdisk and everything. If I run the command from the terminal it plays as expected. If I call the job from cron i can see it download and create the files in /mnt/ramdisk but nothing ever plays. After a while it seems to clear the files in the ramdisk as well like it should when it's done. But again, nothing ever plays. Any idea?
Nevermind, kept poking around and discovered that the playnews script/program is calling "asterisk -rx "rpt......" to initial the playing of audio files. At least on my ASL3 installation I've found that asterisk isn't part of the default "path" or however you want to refer to it and the complete path must be used.
I edited the playnews script and modified every line that was calling asterisk to include the full path. For example,
/usr/sbin/asterisk -rx "rpt $MODE $NODE $TMPDIR/news"
This seems to be working now.