Pyrana 2.0.0

ABOUT

This program was written out of frustration with larger music players. Pretty much all I’ve ever wanted out of a music player was one that played random albums by picking a random artist, then picking a random album, then playing that album, then picking another random artist.

For some reason,I’ve never run into a music player that played random albums that way, which led to me often ending up having to skip past multiple albums by a particular artist, especially when the artist has a large discography.

While I call this player minimalist, that’s not set in stone – I’ll probably add last.fm scrobbling capability and other various features. These features will, however, be ones that I find useful. I highly doubt this app will ever be incredibly bloated.

REQUIREMENTS

Pyrana WILL NOT WORK if you do not install what is outlined below.

You’ll need PyGTK, available from http://www.pygtk.org/downloads.html . (last version I teseted on was 2.22 ) Its setup.py throws a big old warning if you try to install it via setuputils, and I’ve never actually had it successfully install that way. On the plus side, your package manager probably provides a package, if it’s not already on your system.

You’ll also need to install python-notify >= 1.1, available from http://www.galago-project.org/files/releases/source/notify-python/ . I’ll probably try to move away from this dependency in the near future.

ALSO, you’ll need to install gst-python >= 0.10.0, available from http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/src/gst-python/ . This is another dependency I’ll be most likely removing at some point…

Your music directory has to be arranged in a artist/album heirarchy. Something like:

music/

Underpowered Umpires/

Third Strike/

Robby and the Revoltors/

William S. Burroughs Was My Father/

CONFIGURING

Pyrana stores its configuration in ~/.pyrana/pyrana.cfg. It currently accepts 3 options:

use_notify :: whether or not to use libnotify to pop up little messages about what’s playing, defaults to True

music_dir :: where your music is located, defaults to ~/music

seen_file :: where to store the file containing hashes of seen songs

update_pidgin_status :: whether you want Pyrana to update your pidgin status for you when a track updates, defaults to True

CREDIT

Credit is due to Shel from http://kipdreaming.com for the sweet tray icons. Thanks, Shel!

CONTACT

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Hate-mail? Hit me up at jeremiah.dodds@gmail.com