[Rhythmbox-devel] retreive rythmbox status via shell script.....

[matt nicholson]

hello all. sorry to go straight to the developers mailing list on this 
one but it seemed to be the best choice, ehre is my problem/situation:

i am a former xmms zelot. i a month or so ago, crafted this neat little 
shell script that would, when the song changed in xmms, from an 
info-pipe get the file path, using that to run though a id3 tag reader 
on teh file and extract the artist/album/title, scubs those with perl as 
needed, then run a python script i wrote to talk to amazon and get the 
album art url for the correct album/artist. this all came back to the 
scrtip which then generated a little bit of php code in a text file 
which was then uploaded to my web server for inclusion on my website, so 
the last song i listened to, including a link to stream it and a nice 
thumbnail of the album art was displayed.

i have been however, pressing myself to use more and more "gnome" or 
"gtk" apps, to keep a nice consistent desktop (xmms doesn't it in to 
this, also, my collectionw as gorwing to large to manage via xmms) 
rhythmbox, was a natural choice cause i've only had great things to say 
about it and didn't move on earlier simply because of habit.

so, today i got around to attempting to convert my script. i notice 
rhythmbox has some command line switches, such as --print-playing-path, 
which worked perfect forme, although i had to scrub out the file:// and 
repalce teh %20 with space, but that was trivial. everything works 
perfect, except that i, unless i wanted to write a bonobo (i think...) 
component/script/whatever to talk to rhythmbox, would have no way of 
knowing when teh song chaged...well, i thought, this is a small script, 
not intensive, i can have it write to a lgo file and then check one a 
minute to see if teh song has changed and just add it to cron. here i 
hit my problem: for the "--print-playing-path" switch to work, it seems 
i have to be on a terminal running on the same display as rhythmbox, 
because trying to run that switch from an ssh session, as the same user, 
yeilds:  (rhythmbox:16736): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:

which is odd because that means its attempting to open a display to run 
on, even though rhythmbox is running, so...jsut show me the data...

so, this is where i stand now. i have breifly broswed things such as the 
rhythmbox-gaim plugin etc to see how they get their data from rthymbox, 
however i would liek to avoid writting a program/plugin, and keep this 
script based. is tehre a way for me to contact rhythmbox from a diffrent 
term/from cron? is there a way to trigger something (a command) when 
rhythmbox changes songs?

and advice, help, ideas, question, anything would be great. i've been 
wanting to play a more active/contributing role in the community and 
hopefully this is a good starting point for me to learn more. oh, 
excelent work on rhythmbox.

mat nicholson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
sjoeboo.com (see the album art thing here if you want to, though, it 
won't be current)
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