Hi all, after being annoyed at the little love that banshee receives by plugins, I decided to write my own plugin for awn. It is in the form of a python script that you run independently of awn and banshee and connects via dbus. I don't have that much programming experience especially with contributing to projects, so I didn't make a plugin for either programme. If anyone knows how to make it into a plugin for banshee though, I would look into it. I'd appreciate any testing you can do as well. Thanks, you can find at at launchpad: http://launchpad.net/awnbanshee/trunk/first-release/

Installation directions etc are included.

EDIT: I just read that awn 0.4 will include no dbus backend. Why remove this feature, it is amazingly useful for writing a quick plugin? Also, does anyone know what form the new API will take i.e. will it be easy to port from dbus -> plugin.

FYI, there is also a Banshee plugin in the awn-extras branch, written in Mono.

I don't think that it's to do with the title of Banshee changing, as the script picks up the song title and artist from Banshee and then figures out the title of the window. However, I think what you're seeing is the frames of animation from what the icon was when a song was playing (but actually never got set) back to the default icon. You're right that this is because the title changes back to "Banshee". To see if this is the case, try setting the interval between animation frames to something large, like 1 second. You're not using a different language other than english are you, because the window title is hard coded to be "Title by Artist" and the by in the middle would be different if it's not in english. This might also cause the buttons not to be added since they are added when there is no song playing and the title is "Banshee Media Player".

I'm not entirely sure what the problem is, but if you run awnbanshee.py in a terminal, it should print out a whole load of diagnostic information as it goes, could you paste here any error messages, and/or points where the script hangs, or in fact the whole log if there are no obvious errors? I'm using Banshee 1.4.3 too, so that shouldn't be a problem.

Also, could you look at the directory in which the script is located, and you should see the icons being generated as awnicon.png and animation frames in the ./Animations directory. are these icons being generated, but just not set in awn? If they're not being generated, make sure you set all shell scripts to be executable.

Run the script in a terminal, and see what it throws out.

I think we stumbled upon the problem then. I'm using a swedish translation of Banshee. I've already checked the terminal, I do not get any errors, and if I look in the directory for awnbanshee I see the covers changing as they should.

To help you change the code (if you would want to) "title by artist" would be "titel av artist" and "Banshee mediaplayer" would be "Mediaspelaren Banshee".

Perhaps you could let the user change these strings at the top of awnbanshee.py, just like you change the other options there.

Hi Rizzly, I did as you suggested and added user-configurable strings for "by" and "Banshee Media Player". I have it working on my (English) Banshee 1.4.3. Could you let me know if it works for you now? Just download AwnBanshee-1.3.tar.gz and install over the older version.

Thanks, coming from other, windows, docks I found the level of plugins for awn disappointing, so I decided to contribute my own.

I don't *think* it's a language issue, as only banshee's internal names are used for control, not the display names. I couldn't reproduce this bug so I can't figure out what might be causing it. Could you tell me the specific steps (from startup) to take to reproduce it?

I think I know the problem, as I had the same problem. In Ubuntu, the default launcher for Banshee has the following command:

banshee-1 --redirect-log --device-activate=%u

When run, the script continues to say, "Waiting for banshee...". I changed the launcher to use simply:
banshee-1

And it worked. The extra parameters are what break it (not the -1 part).

@Rizzly: there is no way to check if controls are already present, but only whether they were added correctly. So, I chose not to add controls again as this could result in duplicate controls that would do nothing.
I have managed to duplicate the problem (I think) I had the script starting from the wrong working directory. It now checks it's own directory and changes it if needed. This causes the problem as the script adds buttons and then crashes, so the controls do nothing.
I booted into Swedish, and noticed that "Shuffle" and "Repeat All" were still in English. You can now set these to their Swedish names.

@carpediem: the debugging string doesn't pick up the name of the launcher, so it will always say exactly "Waiting for banshee..." But I had the command set to just banshee-1 and it worked, thanks for spotting this for me, adding to the README

In any case, the script at least will tell you whether buttons have been added and you can now start it from any directory e.g. in a startup script.

@Rizzly, does the 1.4 version now work for you if you set the launcher command to banshee-1?

Thanks, and thank you for helping me iron out some bugs.

Unfortunately that's not really possible. You can either have a system default button, which gives you a named button with an icon, and overrides any custom name you give the button. Alternatively, you can have a custom name with no icon, I opted for an icon as it looks neater.

If you really want to have no icon and a custom name, you can change lines 58, 59 and 60, for example replacing

prevID = awn.AddTaskMenuItemByName(taskName, "gtk-media-previous","Previous")

with e.g.

prevID = awn.AddTaskMenuItemByName(taskName, "none","_Föregående")

where the underscore goes before the letter to make a keyboard shortcut, in this case f. These keyboard shortcuts only work if the context menu is visible though.

Do you know you can set system wide keyboard shortcuts for banshee (in Ubuntu at least) if you enable the Multimedia Keys plugin, and then go to System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts and then changing the sound shortcuts to key combinations of your choice.

Hmmm, the update had the exact opposite fact for me, it made autostarting work properly! But the script seems to be oddly sensitive to the exact way in which you start it. The only change should be that you don't need to cd into the correct directory anymore. Try using this script:

#! /bin/bash
~/AwnBanshee/awnbanshee.py &

I think the ampersand stops it closing with the shell, but I'm not really sure.

I'd prefer it if some form of adding menu items remained even if not over DBus as I can see a lot of potential. I suppose it's not integral to the banshee plugin, just an added feature though. I'll probably rewrite it for awn 0.4 anyway, thanks for the heads up.

This startup problem is very odd I must say, and with your proposed script it didn't work either. I also tried adding the script to /etc/init.d/ without any success.

Also, about starting the plugin in general. As of now it does not matter when I start it as long as ubuntu is started and I'm in a session, neither did it before. So it seems that the problem only surfaces when I try to have it as an autostart application, wich is odd.

If you are using ubuntu, does it work for you?

I use a script in Ubuntu as you described:

cd /home/username/AwnBanshee
./awnbanshee.py

That script is autostarted using Preferences > Startup Applications (formerly Sessions).

Working perfectly for me (because I made the change to the Banshee launcher as I describe above).

Thanks for the temporary fix Carpediem!

I still haven't figured out why this happens or what is the best way to start it up, but if you use carpediem's script, you could call the ./restart script to ensure only one instance of awnbanshee.py is running at one time.

Hey, the controls work fine but with every theme I get the error massage:

AwnBanshee/Themes/none/iconify: line xx: convert: command not found

any ideas ?

ImageMagick solved the problem - you should put that info in the readme ...

tanks a lot ...