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

(or, if you use Arch, I maintain this package in the AUR:)

$ yay -S empress

Then launch the daemon process in order to use it — you will probably want to put this in an rcfile (or see below for setting up a service):

$ empress server

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

NOTE: If you install the D-Bus service below, an empress daemon will automagically spawn when any of the client commands below are executed.

Usage

Once you have the daemon running (or you enable autostart below), 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.

Installing empress as a Service

empress can be installed as a service to allow autostarting and lifecycle management using D-Bus and systemd. To do this, run the following:

$ scripts/install-services.sh -l <path to empress binary>

This will install the D-Bus and systemd service files into ~/.local/share. If you installed empress with cargo install, the path to the binary will probably look something like /home/<user>/.cargo/bin/empress.

If you want to make a system-wide installation, simply omit the -l flag. This will install the session service files into /usr instead (but note that empress never runs as a D-Bus system bus).

Uninstalling

To remove installed service definitions, simply run:

$ scripts/install-services.sh -rl

Like with above, remove the -l to uninstall the service files from the system folders.