XMMS Volume Control

As a user of Debian GNU/Linux, I have a keyboard with multimedia buttons like "play" and "stop" that I wanted to map to control the software I use. Fortunately, I found a simple solution, thanks to the 'xbindkeys' package. This package allows you to specify programs to run when particular keys are pressed, making it easy for me to configure my keyboard to play music, skip tracks, and more using XMMS.

XMMS can be controlled from the command line to do a lot of things, so configuring it with xbindkeys was straightforward. To do this, I specified the programs to run when I press a particular key on my keyboard. For example, I set the following commands for the corresponding actions:

- prev: xmms --rew
- next: xmms --fwd
- play: xmms --play
- pause: xmms --pause
- stop: xmms --stop
- volume up: ???
- volume down: ???

As you can see, all the buttons allow me to do something useful except change the volume. To adjust the volume, I have to use my mouse or adjust the speakers manually. However, I was impressed with the cleanliness of XMMS's source code when I looked it over, and I decided to add the code to recognize two new options and make them work. I patched three files to create two new command-line options:

- --vol-up (-l == Louder)
- --vol-down (-q == Quieter)

Overall, I found the combination of Debian GNU/Linux, XMMS, and xbindkeys to be a powerful and flexible setup for controlling multimedia functions with my keyboard.