gPodder and EMMS

I use gPodder to pull podcasts for all my listening pleasure at work. I had been using gnome-mplayer to listen to them but after a recent re-install, gnome-mplayer started to hanging every when I pause the playback. Gmplayer works fine so I know that mplayer, by itself, is not the problem but that doesn’t have a systray icon to make it easy to click and pause playback.

Since I’m so frequently using emacs, I thought to myself “I wonder if I can do this in emacs?” Of course, I can. Enter emms.

emms Configuration

Based on a little bit of research, I decided to use mplayer as the backend. The setup is pretty easy. This is what I’m using based on this blog post.

;; emms

(require 'emms-player-mplayer)
(require 'emms-source-file)
(require 'emms-source-playlist)

(setq emms-player-mplayer-command-name "mplayer"
      emms-player-mplayer-parameters '("-slave")
      emms-player-mpg321-command-name "mpg123"
      emms-player-list
      '(emms-player-mplayer
	emms-player-mplayer-playlist
	emms-player-mpg321
	emms-player-ogg123))

gPodder Configuration

Now that I can listen to the music via emacs, I need to tell gPodder how to feed the podcasts into emms. It’s simple to add them to playlist from outside of emacs with this:

emacsclient --server-file=work --eval '(emms-add-file "TD140.mp3")'

In $HOME/.config/gpodder/gpodder.conf, you can set the player setting. gPodder replaces the %U with the file name. … In theory. In practice, gPodder only replaces %U if it’s at the end of the line. That means I needed to write a quick wrapper.

my $file = shift @ARGV;

my $emacs = "emacsclient –server-file=work";

my $command = "$emacs –eval '(emms-add-file "$file")'";

#print "$command\n";

system "$command";

I run emacs in daemon mode (with TCP). If you don’t, you’ll want to change the $emacs variable.

And you’re done. Happy listening.