Examples

This page contains collection of small examples to show of the features of SoCo and hopefully get you well started with the library.

All examples are shown as if entered in the Python interpreter (as apposed to executed from a file) because that makes it easy to incorporate output in the code listings.

All the examples from Playback control and forward assume that you have followed one of the examples in Getting your devices and therefore already have a variable named device that points to a soco.SoCo instance.

Getting your devices

Getting all your devices

To get all your devices use the soco.discover() function:

>>> import soco
>>> devices = soco.discover()
>>> devices
set([SoCo("192.168.0.10"), SoCo("192.168.0.30"), SoCo("192.168.0.17")])
>>> device = devices.pop()
>>> device
SoCo("192.168.0.16")

Getting any device

To get any device use the soco.discovery.any_soco() function. This can be useful for cases where you really do not care which one you get, you just need one e.g. to query for music library information:

>>> import soco
>>> device = soco.discovery.any_soco()
>>> device
SoCo("192.168.0.16")

Getting a named device

Getting a device by name is done by searching through the devices returned by soco.discover():

>>> import soco
>>> for device in soco.discover():
...     if device.player_name == 'Office':
...         break
... else:
...     device = None
...
>>> device
SoCo("192.168.1.8")

Playback control

Play, pause and stop

The normal play, pause and stop functionality is provided with similarly named methods (play(), pause() and stop()) on the SoCo instance and the current state is included in the output of get_current_transport_info():

>>> device.get_current_transport_info()['current_transport_state']
'STOPPED'
>>> device.play()
>>> device.get_current_transport_info()['current_transport_state']
'PLAYING'
>>> device.pause()
>>> device.get_current_transport_info()['current_transport_state']
'PAUSED_PLAYBACK'

More playback control with next, previous and seek

Navigating to the next or previous track is similarly done with methods of the same name (next() and previous()) and information about the current position in the queue is contained in the output from get_current_track_info():

>>> device.get_current_track_info()['playlist_position']
'29'
>>> device.next()
>>> device.get_current_track_info()['playlist_position']
'30'
>>> device.previous()
>>> device.get_current_track_info()['playlist_position']
'29'

Seeking is done with the seek() method. Note that the input for that method is a string on the form “HH:MM:SS” or “H:MM:SS”. The current position is also contained in get_current_track_info():

>>> device.get_current_track_info()['position']
'0:02:59'
>>> device.seek("0:00:30")
>>> device.get_current_track_info()['position']
'0:00:31'