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 player name can be done with the soco.discovery.by_name() function:

>>> from soco.discovery import by_name
>>> device = by_name("Living Room")
>>> device
SoCo("192.168.1.18")

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'

Seeing and manipulating the queue

Getting the queue

Getting the queue is done with the get_queue() method:

>>> queue = device.get_queue()
>>> queue
Queue(items=[<DidlMusicTrack 'b'Blackened'' at 0x7f2237006dd8>, ..., <DidlMusicTrack 'b'Dyers Eve'' at 0x7f2237006828>])

The returned Queue object is a sequence of items from the queue, meaning that it can be iterated over and its length aquired with len():

>>> len(queue)
9
>>> for item in queue:
...     print(item.title)
...
Blackened
...and Justice for All
Eye of the Beholder
One
The Shortest Straw
Harvester of Sorrow
The Frayed Ends of Sanity
To Live Is to Die
Dyers Eve

The queue object also has total_matches and number_returned attributes, which are used to figure out whether paging is required in order to get all elements of the queue. See the ListOfMusicInfoItems docstring for details.

Clearing the queue

Clearing the queue is done with the clear_queue() method as follows:

>>> queue = device.get_queue()
>>> len(queue)
9
>>> device.clear_queue()
>>> queue = device.get_queue()
>>> len(queue)
0