Panflute

Which Player is chosen?

Asked by Fabian Homborg

How do I know which players status panflute actually displays?
I am asking because recently panflute (v.0.6.2) showed mpds status instead of amaroks (which was chosen as the preferred player) and led me on a wild goose chase looking for amarok bugs.

Could such a feature be implemented in future versions?

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Panflute Edit question
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Solved by:
Paul Kuliniewicz
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Best Paul Kuliniewicz (kuliniew) said : 		#1

There's no way to do this from the applet, but it can be done from the command line by sending the right message to the Panflute daemon:

$ dbus-send --print-reply --session --dest=org.mpris.panflute / org.freedesktop.MediaPlayer.Identity
method return sender=:1.126 -> dest=:1.2414 reply_serial=2
   string "Panflute 0.6.2 / Rhythmbox"

I'm not convinced exposing this somewhere in the applet is worthwhile, since regularly using more than one music player seems like it would be an infrequent use case. However, it would be useful for the (planned) Panflute debugging tool, which would basically be a graphical dump of what the daemon is reporting.

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Fabian Homborg (fhomborg) said : 		#2

Thanks Paul Kuliniewicz, that solved my question.

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Reverend Entity (reverendentity) said : 		#3

It would be great if future versions allowed you to specify which players Panflute would run for. For example, I would want Panflute running when I'm using Rhythmbox or Clementine to play music, but not when I'm running VLC because I only use that to play video.

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Anthony DiSante (theant) said : 		#4

> It would be great if future versions allowed you to specify
> which players Panflute would run for.

I agree completely. I only want Panflute to monitor Banshee, not VLC, Amarok, etc. The current behavior is really annoying for me: I've got VLC open and paused in the middle of an hour-long video podcast that I was watching this morning, but now I'm listening to Banshee, yet Panflute says "Not playing" because it's watching VLC instead of Banshee. I've restarted Banshee and Panflute (daemon and applet) to no avail; the only fix is to restart VLC, but I don't want to do that because I'll lose my place in the podcast.

I see that this bug is marked as "solved" though; should I create a new one for this? I guess it's more of an RFE than a bug, though.

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Paul Kuliniewicz (kuliniew) said : 		#5

Hmm, there's the use case for having more than one player at a time open that I was looking for.

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Paul Kuliniewicz (kuliniew) said : 		#6

Filed as https://bugs.launchpad.net/panflute/+bug/596511