empress: MPRIS media controls made simple

This tool functions as a simple command-line abstraction over the D-Bus MPRIS specification which allows for querying and controlling media players. It functions similarly to playerctl, but features more basic controls and a more complex method of tracking which player you want to control. empress uses its own D-Bus daemon to keep track of which players are currently playing (and which players have been updated the most recently), and uses this information to decide you want to pause Spotify rather than playing a minimized YouTube video.

Installation

To install empress, simply use Cargo:

$ cargo install empress

Then launch the daemon process in order to use it — you will probably want to put this in an rcfile or service definition:

$ empress server

The server will gracefully shut down if interrupted or signalled with SIGTERM.

Usage

Once you have the daemon running, you can communicate with it using one of several subcommands, e.g.:

$ empress play-pause

The current list of commands includes, next, previous, pause, play-pause, stop, and play, which all function as you would expect. For more help you can always run empress help.