PlayPause stops the

[natestrong]

Thanks for making this! Really useful!

In Ubuntu I am having an issue when using mediactl PlayPause. Lets say I have Spotify playing and on Chrome, I have a tab with YouTube open. I would expect PlayPause to pause whatever is playing if anything is playing, or to play whatever the last source was being played if nothing is playing. It currently does pause Spotify, but it also starts playing YouTube (it seems to toggle every source).

Thanks,

• Nathan

[aaaaaaaalex]

Hey @natestrong ,
Thanks for the input, great to see someone besides me using this out in the wild 😄 Your issue is valid, and sadly, is a result of how basic this tool is - mediactl broadcasts MPRIS calls to all supporting players reachable over d-bus, which means a Play/Pause call will have the Play/Pause effect on all apps individually.

Similar tools in this ecosystem confront this problem by having a daemon running in the background of your machine constantly, which will watch for the last player you used, and target only that player when you execute the command. Personally, Im not a huge fan of that solution - it's one more thing running in the background of my environment! 😄

A daemon-less solution might involve writing a hook that gets executed every time window/mediaplayer focus changes, and taking note in a config file of what the last-used player is, based on what the hook saw. Sadly Im not knowledgeable enough in X11 to know more off-hand. Maybe a good compromise/first-step for this app would be to add a target cmd-line option, so that you could designate which app you want receiving the broadcast? That wouldn't solve the issue of knowing the "active" mediaplayer, but it would at-least allow outsourcing of that decision 🤔

Alex