Seems there is already a Rhythmbox Audioscrobbler plugin. I haven’t looked at Audioscrobbler lately since I gave up on the XMMS plugin. The RBScrobbler plugin is listed on the Audioscrobbler plugins page, but a more recent version of the plugin can be found on the author’s site. I haven’t tested it out yet.

Today I’ve been using a gDesklet that hooks Rhythmbox to Audioscrobbler. That works pretty well and is nice eye-candy, but using gDesklet is pretty resource intensive just to get that bit of functionality. At first I started exploring gDesklet because their plugins look so nice, but sitting on the desktop puts it behind everything else. Most of the time I’m on the computer I have all my workspaces filled with maximized programs. Viewing the Rhythmlet (or any other desklet) would mean minimizing all the apps in a workspace. Of course, I don’t really need to see it; I just want it to update my scrobbler account, but surely that can be done without all the extra desklet infrastructure.

The Audioscrobbler functionality is something that really should just be integrated into Rhythmbox. I’ve subscribed to their mailing list to see if there is any work being done on that at the moment. I’m not even sure if they have a plugin architecture. The author of RBScrobbler should be able to use his/her work to integrate that functionality into Rhythmbox if its authors are interested in that. Also, I’m going to check out the source and poke around a little. It is stored in the Arch revision control system. I don’t know much about that so I’ll need to learn about that too.