Rhythmbox & Pidgin Music Sharing

Kristopher Ives — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 08:30:10 +0000

Getting music from the internet is no difficult task, but that’s not quite the same as sharing music. If anyone remembers the post 2000 rise in peer-to-peer (P2P) software, such as Kazaa, Gnutella, and eDonkey, then I think you know what I’m talking about. It was always nice to see what someone else like if you found a song or movie you liked.

I use a (default) Pidgin plug-in to set my current messenger status to the song playing in Rhythmbox, since if one of my friends sees it they can ask me for the song or get an idea of my taste in music, possibly recommending another artist or album.

I use the Send To plug-in for Rhythmbox to send a track to a friend. It’s simple, and some of my friends use the Auto Accept Pidgin plugin, so the songs we share go right into our ~/Music directory and can be played in Rhythmbox quickly.

My Rhythmbox PPA

Kristopher Ives — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:59:55 +0000

Ubuntu has been changing some things around with it’s notification icons and GNOME applets. Specifically the volume, power, e-mail and Rhythmbox applets. I could stand for most of that, but don’t mess with my music. My main complaint is that being part of the indicator-applet has broke some things I like, such as quickly showing/hiding or muting, since everything must be done via a menu.

Pidgin had this same problem, and they solved it by offering both indicator applet support and notification area support. After talking with the GNOME folks, and reading this bug report, it’s probably not going to get done. Because of the way Rhythmbox is developed, you must install a new package to get the old behavior back. I just made a PPA with the --enable-appindicator=no flag.

Easiest way to install is just sudo add-apt-repository lp:kris-santiance/oldrb and then grab the “update” from the update manager.

Santiance » Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox & Pidgin Music Sharing

My Rhythmbox PPA