Controlling Mopidy through the Ubuntu Sound Menu

If you are running Ubuntu and installed Mopidy using the Debian package from APT you should be able to control Mopidy through the Ubuntu Sound Menu without any changes.

If you installed Mopidy in any other way and want to control Mopidy through the Ubuntu Sound Menu, you must install the mopidy.desktop file which can be found in the data/ dir of the Mopidy source repo into the /usr/share/applications dir by hand:

cd /path/to/mopidy/source
sudo cp data/mopidy.desktop /usr/share/applications/

If the correct path to the installed mopidy.desktop file on your system isn’t /usr/share/applications/mopidy.conf, you’ll need to set the mpris/desktop_file config value.

After you have installed the file, start Mopidy in any way, and Mopidy should appear in the Ubuntu Sound Menu. When you quit Mopidy, it will still be listed in the Ubuntu Sound Menu, and may be restarted by selecting it there.

The Ubuntu Sound Menu interacts with Mopidy’s MPRIS frontend. The MPRIS frontend supports the minimum requirements of the MPRIS specification. The TrackList interface of the spec is not supported.

Testing the MPRIS API directly

To use the MPRIS API directly, start Mopidy, and then run the following in a Python shell:

import dbus
bus = dbus.SessionBus()
player = bus.get_object('org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.mopidy',
    '/org/mpris/MediaPlayer2')

Now you can control Mopidy through the player object. Examples:

• To get some properties from Mopidy, run:

  props = player.GetAll('org.mpris.MediaPlayer2',
      dbus_interface='org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties')

• To quit Mopidy through D-Bus, run:

  player.Quit(dbus_interface='org.mpris.MediaPlayer2')

For details on the API, please refer to the MPRIS specification.

v1.0.0 (2013-10-08)

• Moved extension out of the main Mopidy project.