Short overview about mpris and command line tools
mpris player
media mlayer remote interface specification, short mpris is a specification to connect media players via dbus.
This is quite useful as you can have one command for example to control Amarok, Audacious or any other mpris capable player.
This are all gui player, so lets have a look at
mpd, a music daemon simple to control via commandline.
mpd natively does not support dbus, but there is another solution,
mpDris, a mpd client exporting the mpris functionality via dbus.
mpris client
A really nice and powerful mpris command-line client is
mpris-remote to access an mpris capable player. Here are some examples
commands:
mris-remote pause # toggle pause
mris-remote next # next
mpris-remote random true
mpris-remote random false
it is really intuitiv, so just use ist.
So what is the benefit?
-
You only have one command to control them all, so you can just switch your music player and your scripts will work. So instead of binding player specific commands to, e.g. your
multimedia keys on the keyboard, consider using mpris and it does not depend if you use mpd, amarok, audacious or any other client.
- Additional features are possible, for example inhibit power-manager when playing
music, so you can close the lid, unhibit when music stop so your pc can start sleep. And this works for multiple player out of the box.
- You can can subscribe to signals from the music player, so you can just get the information and don't have to check the status regular
So, if you going to control a music player via commandline, look if the player support mpris and use this, instead of proprietary
command line.