I am a recent convert over to Linux Mint from Mac OSX.  After running OSX on my converted windows PC for 4 years, I got tired of not being able to update it so I figured I would take another run at Linux on the Desktop.

Linux Mint ships with their “cinnamon” desktop, which is a modified version of Gnome3.  After updating to the latest release of Cinnamon (1.6), I have been tweaking the GUI.  One of the “panel” applets Mint ships with is the Volume control applet, which also lets you launch different system media players.  Mint seems to ship with the basic media apps and uses Banshee as its default MP3 player.

My primary media apps are Pandora and Songbird at the moment.  I am a paid Pandora user, so they give you access to their “desktop app” which runs via Adobe Air.  Here is a little tutorial on adding these 2 apps to the “Launch” area of the sound applet.

First, you can install Sondbird using : sudo apt-get install songbird

Pandora is a little more difficult, see this link on Installing Adobe Air – once this is installed, you can double click on the Pandora.air file and it should install properly.

Adding these to the sound applet requires editing the javascript file that drives the applet, this is located at /usr/share/cinnamon/applets/sound@cinnamon.org.  In a terminal window,

First we need to figure out the name of the pandora launcher file, which I believe gets set up with a unique id for each user.

cd /usr/share/applications

glaw@mint : /usr/share/applications $ ls com.pandora*

com.pandora.desktop.fb9956fd96e03239939108614098ad95535ee674.1.desktop

sudo cp applet.js applet.js.orig
sudo vi applet.js

Look for the line:

let compatible_players = [ “clementine”, “mpd”, “exaile”, “banshee”, “rhythmbox”, “rhythmbox3”, “pragha”, “quodlibet”, “guayadeque”, “amarok”, “googlemusicframe”, “xbmc”, “xnoise”, “gmusicbrowser”, “spotify”, “audacious”, “vlc”, “beatbox” ]

and update it to look like this:

let compatible_players = [ “clementine”, “mpd”, “exaile”, “banshee”, “rhythmbox”, “rhythmbox3”, “pragha”, “quodlibet”, “guayadeque”, “amarok”, “googlemusicframe”, “xbmc”, “xnoise”, “gmusicbrowser”, “spotify”, “audacious”, “vlc”, “beatbox” , “songbird” , “com.pandora.desktop.fb9956fd96e03239939108614098ad95535ee674.1” ];