Cover art with some Clutter

This is my further work on Clutter and Rhythmbox just this time it is actually supposed to do something useful. At least more useful than just spinning that red hand endlessly ;P Fetching covers is done by transplanted API from the original Cover Art by James Livingstone - GUI is Clutter powered of course.

So that's basically it, not mentioning that half of the Cover Art API still remains unclear to me as I have focused on getting the appropriate clutter stage background color. Still, the way it's done is hackish so must be redone.

You need python-clutter package to run this, source code is available via subversion from

svn checkout http://coverartclutter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ coverartclutter

Rhythmbox + Clutter = RhythmClutter

Something like one year ago I was working on a project called banshee-fleow-plugin. Unfortunately, due to lack of free time and mostly due to unavailability of Tao-Framework in any Linux distro this C# driven project died.

Although my project's end may seem to be a little bit disappointing, over the last year certain things changed to better. As for eye-candy interfaces, two new open-source projects should be mentioned here: Clutter and Pigment

For the beginning, I have decided to pick up the first one, although I am keen on trying some Pigment later on to have some comparision. Actually I do not know any Python at the moment expect for the fact that indentions should be somehow the same. Yeah, I know I could try code that in C but I wanted to learn something new and Python seems very promising.

The example shown above is a combination of the sample python plugin provided with Rhythmbox and the super-oh example provided with Clutter - I just love the open-source :] Anyway, I hope this piece of code will be helpful to anyone, including me, willing to add some eye-candy/improved usability to Rhythmbox. I reckon there is a need for such things - improved Cover Art plugin is now on my mind and after that something more impressive like Coverflow :)

Wanna try it out? Clutter is available in gutsy repositories:

sudo apt-get install python-clutter

RhythmClutter source code is available via svn:

svn checkout http://rhythmclutter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ rhythmclutter

Don't forget that all python plugins should be placed in ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins directory