Easy control of the Music Player Daemon in the Gnome Panel

Disclaimer: this article is for dummies like me.

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I use MPD as a media player, which is very convenient: the daemon is very small and economical, and it works very reliably and quickly.

In order not to spoil these qualities, I wanted to manage it from Gnome as easily, simply and without overhead. There is a special applet of the Gnome music-applet panel in the repository, but it pulls a lot of dependencies, is not very convenient, and in general I didn’t have a relationship with it. In the end, I settled on the most straightforward decision.

Need MPC

MPC (Music Player Command) is a tiny utility for managing MPD from the command line. If you are already tense, you can exhale, we will not issue commands for control manually.

So, put MPC:

sudo aptitude install mpc

Create buttons on the panel

You need to add a few buttons to your taste, for example, as in picture 1 above.

There is one caveat in my configuration. I use a vertical panel, because on a wide screen it allows you to use the screen space more efficiently. But by default, the launch buttons are scaled to fit the width of the panel, which is unnecessarily completely different from what we wanted.

I found a very convenient panel applet Launchers List, enabling labels mow up and down in the required amounts:

sudo aptitude install quick-lounge-applet

After doing this, right click on an empty space on the panel and select the Add to ... Plesk Panel . Then right click on the “handle” of the freshly added applet and Preferences :



So, the recommended commands are as follows:

• mpc prev - previous track.
• mpc toggle - play / pause.
• mpc next - next track.
• mpc random - play scatter on / off
• mpc update - re-scan the directory with music files.

You can find out about all the features of mpc in the usual way:

man mpc

I used standard icons as buttons for buttons, for example, from the catalog /usr/share/icons/Humanity/actions/16/.

Promoting

For the most beautiful, you can use standard notifications to Ubunt so that after pressing the button it looks like this for a while:



To do this, we will use the notify-send utility , which is part of the libnotify-bin package:

sudo aptitude install libnotify-bin

as well as a small script that needs to be saved (say, under the name mpd -control ) somewhere (for example, in ~ / bin), give the right to execute:

chmod +x mpd-control

and then run it instead of mpc. It also supports 5 of the above commands (prev, next, toggle, random and update).

Update: for the most severe - the idea was developed and made by an HTTP server in Python for a more advanced display of prompts.

See it once?

Sometimes it’s interesting what exactly is playing. Personally, I use the usual conky to satisfy my curiosity , which has in its extensive arsenal of sensors and data on the status of MPD. It looks something like Figure 2 on the right.

Finishing touches

Still sometimes I want to control playback without a mouse and from any application. If you want this and you have Compiz installed, you can assign the appropriate commands to the CompizConfig Settings Manager ( sudo aptitude install compizconfig-settings-manager), including the multimedia buttons on the keyboard:


That's all.