audtool not working from crontab or console

[Myk Dowling]

Binary package hint: audacious

Ubuntu 8.04
Audacious 1.5.0-2ubuntu2~hardy1

I'm trying to use crontabs to change my current playlist in Audacious, so that the music playing first thing in the morning is different to the music I drift off to sleep listening to.

audtool completely fails to work when not run from an xconsole inside the same X session as Audacious.

When run from a standard console, I get:
-------------------

me@mymachine:~$audtool --current-song
In program audtool:
  * While attempting to connect to the D-Bus session bus
Error: D-Bus Error: dbus-launch failed to autolaunch D-Bus session: Autolaunch
rror: X11 initialization failed.

me@mymachine:~$

----------------
I assume this is the same thing that happens when audtool is run from a crontab. The command gives no output to standard or error outputs, and I can see nothing in the system logs.

Running this same command from an xconsole returns the currently playing song's name, using the current song name format as shown in the playlist and player.

I used to use XMMS, which handled this exact case perfectly. (Though by running xmms, rather than a separately-identified tool)

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner.
There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. It would help us a lot if you could test Audacious 2.3 from the latest stable Ubuntu version (10.04) or the current Ubuntu development version (10.10). If you can test it, and it is still an issue, we would appreciate if you could upload updated logs by running apport-collect #286791, and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.

[This is an automated message. Apologies if it has reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Myk Dowling (politas)]

Just installed audacious in Ubuntu 10.04, and this issue is still apparent.

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

audacious 2.4-alpha1 is affected too. Can you report the bug upstream at http://jira.atheme.org?

[Myk Dowling (politas)]

I've actually given up on Audacious some time ago due to the crippling bugs I reported that weren't being looked at, and have switched to Rhythmbox. I don't have much care factor left for Audacious. The whole Beep media player thing seems to have taken all the glitz from Winamp, and lost the best functionality from XMMS.

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

Forwarded to upstream: http://jira.atheme.org/browse/AUD-211

[Andrej Shadura (andrew.sh)]

Just use DISPLAY=:0 audtool ... where :0 is you X11 session's display

[Andrej Shadura (andrew.sh)]

Not a bug, won't fix

[Myk Dowling (politas)]

Ah. And of course, since that's not directly part of the audtool program, you aren't going to mention it in the man page, either? Because everyone who uses Linux should know technical details of X.