I use Rhythmbox as my primary music player in Ubuntu Linux, but a few months ago I switched from GNOME desktop to KDE. Since Rhythmbox is a GNOME-style program I couldn’t find an easy way to setup global hotkeys in the KDE desktop that send commands like Pause and Play to the running instance of Rhythmbox. The command-line tool “rhythmbox-client” provides a solution:
Create a launcher anywhere in your desktop’s menu system that runs the command you want, for example
rhythmbox-client --play-pause |
And then assign a global shortcut key to that launcher, for example Ctrl + Alt + \.
Here is a list of all the commands rhythmbox-client supports:
| --no-start | Don’t start a new instance of Rhythmbox |
| --quit | Quit Rhythmbox |
| --no-present | Don’t present an existing Rhythmbox window |
| --hide | Hide the Rhythmbox window |
| --next | Jump to next song |
| --previous | Jump to previous song |
| --notify | Show notification of the playing song |
| --play | Resume playback if currently paused |
| --pause | Pause playback if currently playing |
| --play-pause | Toggle play/pause mode |
| --play-uri=URI to play | Play a specified URI, importing it if necessary |
| --enqueue | Add specified tracks to the play queue |
| --clear-queue | Empty the play queue before adding new tracks |
| --print-playing | Print the title and artist of the playing song |
| --print-playing-format | Print formatted details of the song |
| --set-volume | Set the playback volume |
| --volume-up | Increase the playback volume |
| --volume-down | Decrease the playback volume |
| --print-volume | Print the current playback volume |
| --mute | Mute playback |
| --unmute | Unmute playback |
Note that the launcher you create will probably NOT open a terminal by default, so any output that might result from your Rhythmbox command (from the “--print-playing” command, for example) will probably be lost.