mpris2controller

mpris2controller is a small daemon for the Linux desktop that intelligently controls MPRIS2-compatible media players. It responds to commands via multimedia keys or via a command-line interface, and controls all open media players at once.

• Play/Pause control
  • Plays the most recently paused media player if none are currently playing
  • Pauses all media players if one or more are currently playing
• Next/Previous control
  • Advances to the next or previous song on the media player that is currently playing, or on the most recently used media player if all are paused.

It accomplishes this by keeping track of the playback status of all MPRIS2 players currently active in a user's session, alleviating problems such as only being able to have keybindings for a specific player, having all players start playing at once, etc.

Installation

mpris2controller is written in Python 3, and requires the following dependencies:

• dbus-python (packaged as python-dbus on some distributions)
• python-gobject (for the glib mainloop)

To install, simply place the mpris2controller script from this repository somewhere in your PATH. For example, place mpris2controller in /usr/local/bin with

git clone https://github.com/icasdri/mpris2controller.git
sudo cp mpris2controller/mpris2controller /usr/local/bin
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/mpris2controller

For Arch Linux users, mpris2controller-git is available in the AUR.

Usage

mpris2controller allows you to control all of your MPRIS2-compatible multimedia players at once using the mpris2controller command.

• mpris2controller PlayPause to play the most recently paused media player or pause all media players
• mpris2controller Next or mpris2controller Previous to advance to the next or previous song on the currently playing media player
• mpris2controller Status to get playback status of the most recently used media player
• mpris2controller Metadata to get media's metadata (artist, title, etc) from the most recently used media player

On the first run of any of these commands, mpris2controller will attempt start its daemon on-demand and detect running media players. To start the daemon manually, simply run mpris2controller (with no arguments) or mpris2controller --nofork (which starts the daemon in the foreground). Either of these commands can also be placed in an appropriate autostart system to autostart mpris2controller with a desktop session.

To use mpris2controller via multimedia keys, simply add the desired keyboard shortcuts for the above commands via your desktop environment or window manager. For example, in GNOME, see gnome-control-center keyboard.

DBus

The daemon can also be controlled via methods exposed on the DBus session bus.

• Bus Address: org.icasdri.mpris2controller
• Interface: /org/icasdri/mpris2controller
• Methods:
  • org.icasdri.mpris2controller.PlayPause
  • org.icasdri.mpris2controller.Next
  • org.icasdri.mpris2controller.Previous
  • org.icasdri.mpris2controller.Quit
  • org.icasdri.mpris2controller.Status
  • org.icasdri.mpris2controller.Metadata