The Grumpy Editor's guide to music managers [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's guide to music managers

Posted Nov 28, 2005 19:51 UTC (Mon) by jonabbey (subscriber, #2736)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to music managers

I listen to a lot of music at home.. I've got about 40 gigs of MP3's that I've ripped from CDs I have purchased over the last 5 years. My Linux system at home is linked to my home stereo system through a nice long patch cable, so I can get good quality sound in my living room.

I still prefer to just use XMMS, in conjunction with NCXMMS, which lets me queue up music to be played from a Wi-fi laptop or Palm Handheld in the living room.

Do any of these programs include APIs for remote driving? I'd love to have a custom Palm app which presented a nice Wi-fi driven remote GUI for a music player on my Linux box.

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The Grumpy Editor's guide to music managers

Posted Nov 28, 2005 20:18 UTC (Mon) by balazs (subscriber, #4704) [Link]

amaroK has a DCOP interface. Some examples:

$ dcop amarok collection totalAlbums
414
$ dcop amarok collection totalTracks
2674
$ dcop amarok player isPlaying
true
$ dcop amarok player nowPlaying
J. S. Bach - II. Largo ma non tanto
$ dcop amarok player playPause
$ dcop amarok player next
$ dcop amarok playlist addMedia /path/to/your.ogg

etc.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to music managers

Posted Nov 29, 2005 7:25 UTC (Tue) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link]

Banshee has an API as well.

It is explicitly packaged in four pieces:

The application itself.
The gstreamer based backend (engine).
The helix based backend (engine).
The development support package.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to music managers

Posted Nov 29, 2005 7:32 UTC (Tue) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link]

Quod Libet uses Python plugins that hook into the same signals it uses internally; it also has a rich FIFO interface for people who prefer echo(1) to more bloated tools.

Rhythmbox can use Bonobo, and in recent versions, D-BUS. It's not as convenient for quick use as QL's FIFO or amaroK's DCOP support, but it does get the job done.

Programmatic access is definitely something all the players are interested in.