deepcode.net

First, let me preface this by saying I used to love Amarok, but I feel Amarok 2 is just a bit too far off par for me to continue using.  It all really came to a head when I was listening to a 4-disc set, which all had the same Album name, and I couldn’t sort them by disc, or even by track number.  In the end, I broke down and installed Songbird on my Ubuntu desktop.  I should also mention I am a Gnome user, so these instructions may not work for you KDE users.

Now Songbird has come a long way since I tried it a while back, but it still has a lack of global shortcut keys on Linux.  A very helpful user of the Songbird community released an add-on which enables Command Line Support.

Now that I’ve set up my machine with Global Hot Keys, I’ll show you how to do so as well.  Here’s a step-by-step:

Note: If you are using the .deb installed from gotdeb, there is a wrapper script located at /usr/bin/songbird
Open this file as root in your favorite text editor. At the bottom of the short file, you’ll see:

./songbird

You need to add “$@” to the end of this line, so it should look like:

./songbird "$@"

This will allow the command line arguments to be passed to the actual binary.

· Run “gconf-editor” either from a terminal or the run dialog.  This will bring up an window to edit the gnome configuration options.

· In the menu list to the left, go to “apps” -> “metacity” -> “keybinding_commands”

· I used the first 3 commands as follows (double click on the line to edit):
- command_1: /usr/bin/songbird -pause
- command_2: /usr/bin/songbird -next
- command_3: /usr/bin/songbird -previous

· Once that is done, you will want to go back to your menu list on the left, and find the “global_keybindings” folder (“apps” -> “metacity” -> “global_keybindings”)

· Inside this folder, You should see run_command_1 through run_command_12.  You can now set you desired key bindings.  Personally, I set them similar to Amarok (since I’m used to them.)
- run_command_1: <Super>c
- run_command_2: <Super>b
- run_command_3: <Super>z

If you run into any problems during this process, or just want to keep in touch, you can contact me on twitter or leave a comment below.