Seemanta’s Blog

It has been almost a year since I created my plugin to enqueue files into the Rhythmbox play queue from within Nautilus. I got feedback from several people across the globe regarding the plugin and the most common complaint that came across was that the plugin could not enqueue folders recursively. Also, when some files had embedded special characters, the plugin did not work as expected.

So, finally after a busy year, I sat down one evening and made the requested modifications to the plugin. Now it can handle folders recursively and also embedded special characters within file names. It is also intelligent enough to detect if a folder has zero music files and in that case the option to enqueue the folder itself would not come up. Another good  friend of mine gave a very good suggestion that the plugin should automatically detect the default player in Gnome and enqueue the files to that player. I think I shall take that up as an enhancement in the next version

So, here it is. Download and enjoy! Install instructions are same as before, which you can find in the original post. If you are already using the older version, then you just need to download this version, and replace the old one in your $HOME/.nautilus/python-extensions folder.

Last but not the least, I must thank all of you to have downloaded and tried my original plugin. But more thanks are due because of the fact that you took out time to give feedback. I know a year is late of me to have got back to you with the enhanced plugin, but things were quite hectic on my personal life as a result of which I got very little time for such activities.

admin Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Plugin, Python, Rhythmbox, Ubuntu

Nautilus is the default file manager in Gnome for Linux. And Rhythmbox is the official Gnome music player.  Rhythmbox supports many advanced features like Internet Radio, Library management, support for Apple iPod, DAAP shares and MTP to name a few.

So the other day, I had an idea to find a way to directly enqueue an audio file into the rhythmbox play queue. If you have used Winamp over windows, it is akin to the ‘Enqueue in Winamp’ option that windows explorer provides for audio files if you have installed Winamp in your machine and right clicked over any audio file.

So first I searched if such a Nautilus plugin was really already available. To my happiness I found one plugin, written in python for a similar use but for enqueueing into the playlist of the Audacious, another music player on Linux. So, I downloaded it, and after a few minutes of hacking, it was ready for rhythmbox. So I can’t take entire credit for creating this plugin ;-).

The only trouble I had was to find out which option to use with rhythmbox from the command line to import the audio file into the library AND enqueue it into tha play queue. The man page did not mention anything. Then I downloaded the entire rhythmbox source code and finally from the code was able to know how to achieve what I wanted.

So here it is. Click here to download the plugin, add-to-rhythmbox.py. Installing this plugin is really easy. Just follow the following steps:

1. First, install python-nautilus package which gives the python bindings for Nautilus:

sudo apt-get install python-nautilus

2. Create a folder called ‘python-extensions’ within .nautilus within your home folder. i.e if your home folder is /home/foobar then create /home/foobar/.nautilus/python-extensions.

3. Copy the downloaded script, `add-to-rhythmbox.py` into this python-extensions folder.

4. Restart nautilus with the command:

killall nautilus

That’s it. Now you can right click over any audio file and see the new option to enqueue that file into the rhythmbox play queue. Here is a screenshot of how it looks like:

Screenshot of my Nautilus plugin to enqueue an audio file into Rhythmbox.

Hope this plugin would prove useful to all you Linux/Gnome users. Ideally I should have written this using dbus but was too lazy to do so. Maybe next time I would do that and post version 0.2.

Until my next post, g’bye and take care!

admin Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Plugin, Python, Rhythmbox, Ubuntu