Ubuntu – How to listen to a specific signal in Rhythmbox

The Rhythmbox Plugins Writing Guide has several examples of commands you can use in the Python console to control playback and modify Rhythmbox:

• Play/Pause

  shell.props.shell_player.playpause()
  

• Stop

  shell.props.shell_player.stop()
  

• Next track

  shell.props.shell_player.do_next()
  

• Add a song to the Play Queue

  shell.add_to_queue("file://awsome_song.ogg")
  

• Display a visualization

  import gst
  goom = gst.element_factory_make ("goom")
  sink = gst.element_factory_make ("ximagesink")
  colour = gst.element_factory_make ("ffmpegcolorspace")
  b = gst.Bin()
  b.add (goom, colour, sink)
  b.add_pad(gst.GhostPad("sink", goom.get_pad("sink")))
  goom.link(colour)
  colour.link(sink)
  shell.get_player().props.player.add_tee(b)
  

As far as I know, you need to grep the actual dbus-session of the machine that runs rythmbox. This is kind of tricky. I have installed a script at my server, which is run after boot automatically, and which saves the current dbus-address to a file in my homedir.

If I ssh to the machine later, I can just grep the session-adress from there.

I: Script to store dbus adress: name it "Get.Dbus.sh" and save it somewhere to your disk. Give it the following content:

set | grep DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS > ~/.DBUS_temp

make it executable and add it to your start-items

II: Script to grep the current session: name it "Run.DBus.sh" and save it in e.g. /usr/local/bin/

Give it the following content:

source /home/YOUR_USERNAME/.DBUS_temp
export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
$*

don't forget to make it executable

III: ssh to your machine and start the rhythmbox-client as follows:

Run.DBus.sh rhythmbox-client

This works here!