MadSoft -

As it turns out, I was not the only one who wanted my Banshee song changes to appear in my status on Pidgin. My original script was written for the prerelease version of Banshee 1.0 and since then, Banshee has made some minor changes to the DBus API which effectively break the functionality of my old script. In addition, my script never supported song names with UTF-8 characters in them and thus some people using other locales had issues using the script. Recently I took the time to rectify both of these issues and am providing a much improved updated version of my original plugin.

The same instructions still apply from before so simply refer to the original post for further instruction regarding desktop environment integration and the like.

Update: Also confirmed to be working on Banshee 2.x.

Download pidgin_banshee_status2.py

• Linux
• Scripts

This took a bit longer to get out than I had originally expected but here it is. As a precursor to my previous post, I wanted to make a new “plugin” for pidgin that would update my music status from Banshee because as of the development versions of 1.0, they had an entirely new API in place and other similar plugins hadn’t (and still aren’t as far as I know) been updated to work with the new API. So that’s exactly what I did and its a very simple ~30 line python script that I am putting out to the world in case anyone else wants similar functionality.

Basically you just stick the file in your home directory (or at your option in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin) and add it to your auto-started applications in GNOME or KDE or put it in your xinitrc or whatever you want. For GNOME users I happen to know that you can do this from System > Preferences > Sessions > Startup Programs > Add. For windows users this script will never run because Banshee is *nix only as well as DBus (as far as I know). Enjoy!

Download pidgin_banshee_status.py

Update: Banshee 1.8 Status Update Script for Pidgin

• Scripts

Ever since the DBUS API change (more like overhaul) during the development of Banshee 1.0 and developers haven’t yet started supporting it in their plugins so I decided that I would play around with it. From what I have seen, it seems that the perception is that DBus is hard and complicated but its actually really easy and makes things very simple. Essentially you use a DBus debugger (because in most cases, documentation for an applications’ DBus API is not available) like D-Feet to look up which interfaces, methods, properties, and signals are available to you. Then use them to do what you want.

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• Python