Old school because I still use rhythmbox and metacity. Anyway I’ve been trying to rate my songs as I listen to them since having ratings seems like a practical thing (disregarding that they are stuck in rhythmdb.xml). However, rhythmbox is usually underneath lots of windows and its a multi-step process (click the window, find the song, click the right number of stars, hope I don’t notice some bug in rhythmbox) to rate the song.
I coincidentally happend to notice these big 1 2 3 4 5 buttons (near some My Favorites text) on my keyboard, a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000(!), and thought it’d be neat if I could use them for rating songs in rhythmbox. I first checked to see if the keys were recognized by using gnome-keybinding-properties and assigning them to an action. Come to find out they are XF86Launch5, XF86Launch6, XF86Launch7, XF86Launch8 and XF86Launch9. I don’t know where XF86Launch 1 through 4 are.
Then I read about gconf keys in /apps/metacity/global_keybindings for run_command_1, run_command_2, etc…. I set run_command_1 to XF86Launch5 and so on. Then in /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands I have command_1 set to ‘rhythmbox-client –set-rating 1′. I might be doing it wrong but now with the push of a button I can rate my songs!