Rate songs in notifications with Rhythmbox

Update: Keeping in mind the feedback, I have enabled instant update of the notification once the ratings are changed in my new patch to the notification plugin of Rhythmbox.


When do you rate your songs?

I have a huge music library. Enough to keep me engaged for more than a month if I listen to each song in a row with no repeats. Hence, my preferred time for rating songs is while I am listening to it.


Currently, this process is somewhat complicated. I have to go to Rhythmbox's workspace, rate the song and then figure out which workspace did I just leave and then continue my previous work. This interrupts my work flow.

However, Gnome 3 allows actions in its notifications and one can already do the Previous, Play/Pause, Next actions from within the notification.

Get more play count information in Rhythmbox

I am obsessed with keeping track of what my musical taste is like, and to be able to get quantitative as well as qualitative information about it. Last.fm (and now libre.fm)with audio scrobbling (both via Rhythmbox as well as my old iPod Shuffle), satiates my needs for numbers most of the time, but I would like to know a little more. Initially, I just wanted to know which is the album I listen to the most, but it could easily be generalised to much more easily.
Hence, I made a small plugin extra-playcount for Rhythmbox, (Note: It maybe better to get more recent version of the files from the launchpad code branch) which gives me just that little bit more information. To see the plugin in action, select multiple songs and select properties to get an extra tab in the info window.
The additional data presented is:

1. Number of songs by each artist
2. Playcount of songs by each artist
3. Number of songs in each album
4. Playcount of each album

For bug tracking and development I have set it up as a project on launchpad here.

Installation instructions:

• Extract the contents of the tar ball in home_directory/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins
• Restart Rhythmbox.
• Go to menu Edit → Plugins and enable Extra-Playcount

Extra playcount plugin in action in Rhythmbox