XanClic / krunner-mpd

A KRunner (DBus) module for controlling MPD

Long description

First I was sad that KDE 5 ripped out a lot of the Amarok krunner integration. Then I was sad that (under Arch Linux) even the pitiable rest seemed to have disappeared as well.

On my quest to find out how to restore it I noticed that apparently nobody cares for Amarok anymore (;_;7), so I looked for other music players that might be well integrated into KDE again. First I tried Babe, well, I didn’t like the name and more importantly it crashed when it tried to load my library. Maybe the \u0000 in one of the file tags had something to do with it... Who cares.

So I went on, to Cantata with MPD. That seemed to work, even though change always bites you in the behind somehow (in this case among other things the fact that it insists on splitting albums by artists, so I had to update quite a lot of files with “Various” as their album artist), but, well. Anyway, sadly I had to see that this still wouldn’t give me nice krunner integration.

But I guessed that MPD would be designed in a way to allow me to easily interface it and do whatever simple things I wanted to do. Things like mpc insert "$(mpc search title 告白)"; mpc next for instance.

And lo and behold, as of recently krunner can use dbus to load modules from different processes! So I won’t even have to curse at Qt all the time.

Short description

Thus, I wrote this, a krunner module for controlling the default local MPD instance.

Short feature list

• Simple commands like play, pause, previous, next
• If you just enter something, it will look for hits in your music DB and then allows you to choose between the results – your choice will be inserted after the current track and played immediately
  • If there already is a matching track in your playlist, you can choose to instead jump there
• Prefixing search queries by queue allows you to add tracks at the end of the playlist without jumping there
  • queue album queues whole albums
• anything by gives you a random song by some artist, anything on gives you a random song from a random album
• queue everything by queues everything by some artist, sorted (in ascending order) by date, album title, and track number

Oh, and by the way, even if you’re not on an English system, the commands are still the same. That’s because I personally always hate guessing whatever the translator has come up with now (whereas the English terms are usually rather consistent), and secondly because “queue X” in German would be “hänge X an” – and I’d get crazy both as a developer and a user if I had to either use infix notation or come up with a hack to get around it (like “Anhängen von X”).

Installation

The usual:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ ../configure --prefix=$PREFIX
$ make
$ sudo make install

This copies the plugin to $PREFIX/bin, the locale files to $PREFIX/share/krunner-mpd/locales, a .desktop file for krunner to the kservices directory, and a DBus .service file to /usr/share/dbus-1/services. After that, restart krunner and everything should work (though maybe you need to enable the plugin in the krunner settings).

Configuration

You can place a configuration file under ~/.config/krunner-mpd/config.yaml. Here is an example:

# Options for how to talk to the MPD instance
mpd:
    host: localhost     # MPD host address (default: localhost)
    port: 6600          # The port MPD listens on (default: 6600)

# Options for help with debugging
debug:
    log_file: /tmp/log  # Log file (default: stderr)
    log_truncate: false # Whether to truncate the log file on every launch
                        # (default: true)
    log_level: Debug    # Minimum level of messages to log
                        # (Debug, Info, Warning (default), Error, Critical)