Plugin Development
A Quod Libet / Ex Falso Plugin is a simple python module or package which contains sub-classes of special plugin classes. These classes can provide special methods that get used by QL or can take action on certain events.
At the moment the following plugin classes exist:
Plugin Types
- Event Plugins
Are instantiated as long as they are enabled or QL is running. They get notified when songs start, get added etc.
Can also (3.10+) listen to selection changes in the main songlist.
Example: Last.fm scrobbler that watches what you play and sends the information to last.fm.
- Tag Editing Plugins
Can extend many parts of the tag editor.
Example: Title case your tags.
- GStreamer Plugins
Can inject elements into the GStreamer pipeline and configure them on the fly.
Example: Tempo adjustment to play music/audio books faster.
- Play Order: Shuffle Plugins
Can decide which song to play next or what happens if you select one.
Example: weighted shuffle, which prefers higher rated songs.
- Play Order: Repeat Plugins:
How to repeat the songs
Example: repeat each song a set number of times
- Songs Menu Plugins
Can be accessed through the play list context menu and get passed all selected songs.
Example: Album art search, to search album art for all selected songs.
- Playlist Plugins
Similar to Songs Menu plugin, and in fact derived on the same base class
Can be accessed through the playlist context menu in the Playlist Browser
Example: remove duplicate songs from a playlist.
- Cover Source Plugins
Fetch covers from external or local resources
Location of Plugins
In older versions of Quod Libet, before they were moved into the main
quodlibet
module, plugins could be placed in ~/.config/quodlibet/plugins
on many Linux systems, and in ~/.quodlibet/plugins
on MacOS.
Whilst this still may work, we recommend installing from source (see Creating a Development Environment) for all plugin development, which will allow a fuller integration experience (debugging, etc).
Creating a new Plugin
Assuming you are running from source, put it in
quodlibet/ext
under a directory according to its plugin type (events/
etc).Write the following into the file:
from quodlibet.plugins.events import EventPlugin class MyPlugin(EventPlugin): PLUGIN_ID = "myplugin" PLUGIN_NAME = "My Plugin"
Restart Quod Libet, or click the
Refresh
button in the plugins window.In Quod Libet open
Music
⇒Plugins
and search the list for “My Plugin”
Tips:
The best way to find out what is possible is to read the documentation of the plugin base classes .
The easiest way to get started creating a new plugin is to look for existing plugins that do something similar to what you want.