Fast Clementine music selection via dmenu

If you prefer keyboard over mouse like I do, you'll probably want a keyboard way of selecting music to be played.

We can use dmenu to go through our Music collection and make a auto-complete suggestion list to select Music from.

We'll need to have some packages installed:

sudo apt-get install dmenu clementine xbindkeys

Save the following script (I named it clementine_play_folder.sh) and chmod +x it:

#!/bin/bash
flag=$1

function handleSelection {
  if [[ $1 ]]; then
    folder=$1
    if [ $flag == 'append' ]; then
      msg="Appended songs"
    else
      msg="Loaded songs"
    fi

    notify-send -i clementine "$msg" "$folder"
    if [ $flag == 'load' ]; then clementine --stop; fi
    clementine --$flag "/home/$( whoami )/Music/$folder"
    if [ $flag == 'load' ]; then clementine --play; fi

  fi
  exit 0
}

# If clementine's not running, start it!
if ! pgrep -x clementine >/dev/null; then
  clementine &
fi

handleSelection "$( cd /home/$( whoami )/Music; ls -d */* | dmenu_custom )"

exit 0

Be sure to replace and or edit the Music path at the bottom of the script if you don't have a standard Music folder structure. Otherwise, it should work out of the box. The usage is quite simple, pass either append - to append the folder to the current playlist or load (which is default) - to replace the current playlist - option:

clementine_play_folder.sh load

or

clementine_play_folder.sh append

To set a global keyboard shortcut, I used xbindkeys. Relevant part of my .xbindkeysrc:

"~/scripts/clementine_play_folder.sh load"
  Mod4 + m

"~/scripts/clementine_play_folder.sh append"
  Mod4 + Shift + m

That's all folks, enjoy :)