How to know if Rhythmbox is playing music or something else

Question

I'm trying to solve a bug in this plugin. I want to show the sidebar only when playing music (not podcast or radio). My problem is I don't know what's the user is listening to. Can someone provide me with a way to do that? Thanks.

Answer 1

To get what is currently playing you'll need to:

1. obtain the shell
2. obtain the Rhythmbox Shell-Player from the shell.
3. Get the playing entry from the ShellPlayer
4. Find what the type the entry is.

Lets go step-by-step

Rhythmbox Shell

The shell is a property of the plugin - self.props.shell. So lets save the shell with self.shell = self.props.shell

Rhythmbox Shell Player

The shell player is part of the shell properties - player = self.shell.props.shell_player

Playing Entry

The playing entry is found by interrogating the shell-player

`entry = player.get_playing_entry()

Entry Type

From the entry you can get the entry-type:

entrytype = entry.get_entry_type()

From the documentation - you'll probably just need to test that the entry-type is Song i.e. entrytype.get_name() - other types are used for additional play streams.