DBUS Media Player Integration

[Marc O'Morain]

Hi there,

There has been recent discussion on the rhythmbox list about
keypresses to change volume in the current media player. Also there
have been many dups of bug #132363
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132363

I have been reading about DBUS recently, and it seems like a good idea
to me if there was some DBUS signals that media applications could
send to each other.

When sound-juicer extracts a CD, it could emmit a DBUS signal saying
'there is new 'digial music available'. Rhythmbox, Muine etc. could
respond to this signal by adding the new music to the library.

When the user presses a key to skip the next track, any running media
player will skip to the next track.

Some use cases:

* Alex buys a new over-priced Westlife CD from a highstreet chain. He
is scared of the RIAA and wants to make sure all his music is
legitimate. He puts the new CD into his PC, so that he can put the
songs onto his MP3 player, to listen to the music when he goes on
holidays to France next week. After the CD is inserted, Sound Juicer
automatically opens and Alex rips the audio to his hard disk. Alex
goes for a walk, and when he comes back, he wants to listen to his new
CD. He hits alt+tab to focus on Rhythmbox, types Westlife, and hits
play. The new music plays.

* Dave opens his laptop and it resumes from being suspended. Music
starts to play, and it is a song that he really does not want to hear,
because it reminds him of his ex-girlfriend. He knows that he has a
music player on some desktop that is playing this song, but he doesn't
know what music player or which desktop it is on. He presses
CTRL+ALT+PGDN, and to his relief, the music player plays the next song
in the playlist.

Is there a command line application that will emmit a DBUS signal? To
implement the second use case, it would be elegant if the user could
bind a key-press combination to "dbus-command-line-app --emmit "Play
the next song in my media player, please"

Best Regards,

-- 
Marc O'Morain