I’ve been using Ubuntu on my home, work and laptop boxes for months now. At work I listen to music almost all the time and find xmms to be my player of choice. I hate all the players that want to be my music manager, etc. - I just want a decent mp3 player and xmms fits the bill. The problem is that xmms is not a Gnome app, which is was Ubuntu has all the standard key bindings for. But I have found a solution that works quite well… and doesn’t require a bunch of custom configs and hacking files all over, etc.
In the Preferred Applications settings applet in System -> Preferences, in the Multimedia tab, I set the “Multimedia Player” setting to “Custom” and then use “xmms -t” as the Command - don’t check “Run in terminal”. Then in the Keyboard Shortcuts applet, I set “Media player” to use the Pause/Break key.
Now when if xmms not running, it’s launched and if it is running, play/pause is toggled.
That’s all I needed! Now I’m a happy camper!
Maybe I should look into xmms2, but haven’t bothered yet.