For true players only: spotify, vlc, audacious, bmp, xmms2, and others.

Playerctl is a command-line utility and library for controlling media players that implement the MPRIS D-Bus Interface Specification. Playerctl makes it easy to bind player actions, such as play and pause, to media keys.

For more advanced users, Playerctl provides an introspectable library available in your favorite scripting language that allows more detailed control like the ability to subscribe to media player events or get metadata such as artist and title for the playing track.

For examples, use cases, and project goals, see my blog post.

First, check and see if the library is available from your package manager (if it is not, get someone to host a package for you) and also check the releases page on github.

Using the cli and library requires GLib (which is a dependency of almost all of these players as well, so you probably already have it). You can use the library in almost any programming language with the associated introspection binding library.

Building the project for development requires gtk-doc and gobject-introspection.

To generate and build the project to contribute to development:

./autogen.sh # --prefix=/usr may be required
make
sudo make install

You can skip the install step by adding the location where the library files build to your library path. Put this in your shell rc file while you work on the project:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/playerctl/playerctl/.libs:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

The playerctl binary should now be in your path.

playerctl [--version] [--list-all] [--player=NAME] COMMAND

Pass the name of your player with the --player flag. You can find out what players are available to control with the --list-all switch. If no player is specified, it will use the first player it can find.

Here is a list of available commands:

  play            Command the player to play
  pause           Command the player to pause
  play-pause      Command the player to toggle between play/pause
  stop            Command the player to stop
  next            Command the player to skip to the next track
  previous        Command the player to skip to the previous track
  volume [LEVEL]  Print or set the volume to LEVEL from 0.0 to 1.0
  status          Get the play status of the player
  metadata [KEY]  Print metadata information for the current track. Print only value of KEY if passed.

The latest documentation for the library is available here.

To use a scripting library, find your favorite language from this list and install the bindings library.

This example uses the Python bindings.

#!/usr/bin/env python3

from gi.repository import Playerctl, GLib

player = Playerctl.Player(player_name='vlc')

def on_metadata(player, e):
    if 'xesam:artist' in e.keys() and 'xesam:title' in e.keys():
        print('Now playing:')
        print('{artist} - {title}'.format(artist=e['xesam:artist'][0], title=e['xesam:title']))

def on_play(player):
    print('Playing at volume {}'.format(player.props.volume))

def on_pause(player):
    print('Paused the song: {}'.format(player.get_title()))

player.on('play', on_play)
player.on('pause', on_pause)
player.on('metadata', on_metadata)

# start playing some music
player.play()

if player.get_artist() == 'Lana Del Rey':
    # I meant some good music!
    player.next()

# wait for events
main = GLib.MainLoop()
main.run()

This work is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License (See COPYING).

Copyright © 2014, Tony Crisci