"Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology..."

2008-08-09

Autoqueue goes cross-player!

When m' colleague Sylvain expressed an interest in porting my autoqueue plugin for Quod Libet to itunes, I experimented a little with factoring out all the generic parts, and it turned out the player specific stuff isn't all that much, so I decided to do a little work and see what kind of problems I would run into when porting it to another player. I chose Rhythmbox for my experiment, since it's in my Ubuntu anyway, and it has support for python plugins.

Turns out it was pretty easy. I have a large part of the featureset working in less than a day, with a lot of help from this page:

http://live.gnome.org/RhythmboxPlugins/WritingGuide

and example code in Alexandre Rosenfeld's lastfmqueue plugin:

http://code.google.com/p/airmindprojects/source/browse/#svn/trunk/rbplugins/lastfm_queue

which offers similar functionality, but is a little more lightweight (less features/bloat, depending on how you look at it ;)

I also moved autoqueue into it's own repository, since it's now no longer solely a Quod Libet plugin, nor, hopefully, a single developer effort. If you're a rhythmbox (or Quod Libet) user and you're interested in checking an early, but working version out, get the plugin here:

http://code.google.com/p/autoqueue/source/browse/trunk

You'll need autoqueue.py, rhythmbox_autoqueue.py, and rhythmbox_autoqueue.rb-plugin. Drop those in your ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins directory, start rhythmbox, and activate the autoqueue plugin.

If you have questions, feature requests, or would like to help with porting the plugin to your favorite player, you can contact me directly, or even better, join the autoqueue mailing list here:

http://groups.google.com/group/autoqueue

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