shwango! blog
life, love and some other stuff…

Ubuntu, xmms and key bindings

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.

Comments

  1. Jen
    December 4th, 2007 | 10:33 am

    Why does this excite you so much? :)

  2. December 6th, 2007 | 1:08 pm

    ‘cuz I’m a geek!

  3. January 21st, 2008 | 3:28 pm

    Pat,

    You can make XMMS perform as you wish by doing the following:

    1. Run gconf-editor from a terminal (as your standard non-priv users)
    2. Edit the following keys:
    /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_1 (through 10)
    3. Place the key combo(s) you would like in each one… Say N (for next song)
    4. Edit the corresponding value in /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_1 (through 10) to be something like ‘/usr/bin/xmms -f’ to move forward in the playlist.

    You may also want to look at the -e command, to make sure the playlist isn’t cleared on first launch.

    The alternative is to switch to a real desktop environment such as KDE, or use Amarok, the only real audio player - lol

    -Feige

  4. January 21st, 2008 | 3:31 pm

    BTW. Please tell Jen “Happy Birthday” as it appears we share the same b-day. Albeit, I’m slightly older. :)

    -Feige

  5. January 26th, 2008 | 9:29 am

    Thanks for the info, Jeff. I’ll play with Amarok - it’s got more than I really need - I just want a player, but I did notice the “mini” player that works pretty well.

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