[How-to] Spotify under Wine with multimedia keys and OSD

[Maxim_Buur]

Hi,

After some experimentation, and Spotify-notify (a project on GitHub) having failed me, I found out how to do the following:

1. Control (Next, previous, play/pause) Spotify.exe (running under Wine) with any keys on your keyboard
2. Show the title and artist information of the song switched to in a Ubuntu notification bubble (notify-osd)

This is awesome, because it makes Spotify running under Wine (the best Spotify solution currently available for Linux in my opinion) that more useful, and it feels super native!

Screenshot: http://imgur.com/Y4laM5F

I own an Acer C720 Chromebook running Xubuntu 14.10. I remapped my keys a while ago using this guide:
http://www.reddit.com/r/chrubuntu/co...r_c720/ce2ej5y

The guide:

1. Run this in terminal:

sudo apt-get install xbindkeys xdotool

2. Download spotify_cmd from this link: https://code.google.com/p/spotifycmd/

3. Put the contents of the .zip (spotify_cmd.exe and spotify_cmd.exe.so) in your home folder.

4. Decide which keys you want to use for 1. Next song, 2. Previous song and 3. Play/pause. (In my case I remapped my F1 key to Greek_NU with xmodmap because F1 already does something in Spotify and Chrome, which I found annoying. I then decided to use Greek_NU for previous song, F2 for next song, and F5 for play/pause)

5. Run the following command:

sudo gedit ~/.xbindkeysrc

6. Paste these lines in the file:

"xdotool keyup Greek_NU; ./spotify_cmd.exe prev; notify-send -i /usr/share/icons/Numix-Circle/48x48/apps/spotify.svg "Now playing" "`./spotify_cmd.exe status | tail -n +2 | head -1` - `./spotify_cmd.exe status | tail -n +3 | head -2`"  --urgency=critical --expire-time=1500"
Greek_NU
"xdotool keyup F2; ./spotify_cmd.exe next; notify-send -i /usr/share/icons/Numix-Circle/48x48/apps/spotify.svg "Now playing" "`./spotify_cmd.exe status | tail -n +2 | head -1` - `./spotify_cmd.exe status | tail -n +3 | head -2`" --urgency=critical --expire-time=1500"
F2
"xdotool keyup F5; ./spotify_cmd.exe playpause; notify-send -i /usr/share/icons/Numix-Circle/48x48/apps/spotify.svg "Play/pause" --expire-time=1000"
F5

7. Replace the key symbol names (in red) with the keys you want to use. A list of key symbol names can be found here: http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/...sed_by_Xmodmap

8. Replace the lines in blue with paths leading to the Spotify icon you want to use. (I use the one from the Numix Circle icon theme)

9. Now run:

killall xbindkeys
xbindkeys &

It should work now! Run Spotify (running under Wine) and check it out!

Remember, you can be creative with the lines. To give you a start, what my Greek_NU key does is basically run './spotify_cmd.exe prev' to skip to the previous song. "Now playing" is the title of the notification bubble. (You can change this or remove it altogether) Then `./spotify_cmd.exe status | tail -n +2 | head -1` is a command which fetches the artist name from spotify_cmd.exe, and `./spotify_cmd.exe status | tail -n +3 | head -2` fetches the song title. '--expire-time=1500' means that the notification bubble will be displayed for a 1500 milliseconds. The Google Code spotifycmd website lists more commands you could potentially use.

Edit: Found a way to have cover art in the notifications as well

1. Download spotify_buttons.zip: http://www66.zippyshare.com/v/eRZZnYkB/file.html

2. Extract spotify_buttons.zip into your home directory.

3. Bind your keys to 'bash ~/spotify_buttons/previoustrack.sh', 'bash ~/spotify_buttons/nexttrack.sh', and 'bash ~/spotify_buttons/playpause.sh'.

4. Have fun, it looks and works awesome!

(This works by sending artist+title+'cover' to Google and downloading the first square jpg image)


Have fun with it and don't hesitate to ask me questions!