Plugin concept of Yammi

Yammi's plugin concept allows executing arbitrary programs for a selection of songs, passing the information from Yammi's database about the selected songs (eg. filename, artist, length, ...) to the programs as command line parameters.

Plugin modes

There are two plugin modes existing: single or group mode.
In single mode, the configured program is invoked for each selected song. A typical usage for single mode could be to copy the selection of songs to another location, ie. invoke the copy command for each song.
In group mode, the information for all selected songs is gathered into a list, and the configured program is invoked once for the selection and can use the list as input parameter. A typical usage would be to create a CD label, first gathering the list of songs, then invoke once the program to actually create the label.

Example for single mode

Let's assume you have a mp3 player and conveniently want to copy a selection of songs from within Yammi to your player. Let's assume that your mp3 player is mounted on /media/player.

For plugin mode we choose "single mode" and leave the field custom list, which only applies to group mode, empty.
For menu entry we choose a descriptive name like "copy to mp3 player"
For command we choose a copy command with the appropriate placeholders, eg: cp "{absoluteFilename}" "/media/player/{index}_{filename}". This example will copy the selected files to the directory /media/player (you have to make sure that the player is mounted before executing the plugin), prefixing the filenames of the songs with their index within the selection of songs. Instead of {filename} you could also choose a naming pattern like {artist}/{artist} - {title}, if you need the files to have a certain directory structure and/or naming convention at the target location.

Example for group mode

Let's assume you just burned a selection of songs to CD and would like to create a CD label for that selection. We use a command line tool called cdlabelgen, which does a good job in creating CD labels from command line parameters. Now we only have to feed the appropriate info from Yammi to this program as the appropriate input parameters.

For plugin mode we choose "group mode".
In custom list we have to specify how one entry in our list should look like. We choose the following line: "{index}. {artist} - {title} ({length})%" to create entries like "1. Sylver - Angel (2:16)" (notice the trailing "%" which cdlabelgen requires as separator between entries"
For menu entry we choose a descriptive name like "create CD label"
For command we choose "cdlabelgen -c "{inputString:title}" -s "{inputString:subtitle}" -b -w -i "{customList}" > {fileDialog}". This first pops up two input dialogs asking the user for a title and subtitle, and then creates a CD label using the custom list as input, which finally gets written to a file that the user has to select. (You could also directly invoke kghostview on the created file to view it.)