Programmer are good ones if the are lazy in their style of work, and i using that concept for all my live. So one of my new laziness gadgets, imagine you lie in bed, but your laptop is playing music on your working desk, now a song came up you want to skip or you want to change the volume. Given the fact you have a ssh comparable device like i have my N900 with you, you can easily remote control rhythmbox.
The command line control is rhythmbox-client, unluckly its an GUI app that gets a bit confused if the right environment variables are not set, so that how i make it run easily for me.
First:
Make sure you can access the machine that runs rhythmbox easily, my laptop runs a SSH server, so first i created a certificate on my N900, this is not nessesary if you have there alreada a xxx.pub file:
cd /home/<yourUser>/.ssh
ssh-keygen -t rsa
Second:
You need to make your machine that runs the music play to know that this created certificate is accepted, therefor you need to register it, the first variable here is the key file its called something xxx.pub depending if you use rsa or another algorithm. You also need to copy that key over via SSH so you need to enter the name and ip or your machine that runs rhythbox:
ssh-copy-id -i /home/<yourUser>/ssh/id_rsa.pub <user>@<hostname_or_ip_address>
Third:
Make it more easy to access your remote music machine, if you use it only in a home wifi you can create a SSH config file and if you gave your machine that runs ryhthmbox a name lets say ‘myLaptop’ then this command will connect you via SSH: ‘ssh myLaptop’ but you can choose freely run ‘vim /home/<yourUser>/.ssh/config’ and enter this config option:
Host myLaptop
User yourUser #or whatever you like
Port 22
Hostname <MusicPlayersIP>
IdentityFile /home/<yourUser>/.ssh/id_rsa
TCPKeepAlive yes
IdentitiesOnly yes
Forth:
The command to change your rythmbox need some variables set as well, that makes it quite long, so i suggest you create an alias for that, normally you do that in ~/.bashrc (for your user only) /etc/bash.bashec (for systemwide) but if your machine like mine N900 just using shell not bash you need to use ~/.profile . Add now the alias command to our file of choice:
alias rc='ssh yourUser@myLaptop env DISPLAY=:0.0 rhythmbox-client --no-start'
Usage:
You can use that new command now for:
- rc –help # get all options
- rc –next # next song
- rc –previous # next song
- rc –volume-up # louder
- rc –volume-down # more quite
- rc –pause # pause the music
- rc –play # start playing music
Some tip, the volume up and down command just change the internal rhythmbox level, so before you go with some beers, sandwiches, to bed an plan to stay there all sunday long, set the rhythmbox level to middle and ajust your system sound level to normal room sound, now you have room for more lous and more quite, and no reason to get up at all … well, get some empty plastic bottle and you even can save the way to your washroom 
N900, N810, N800 Users
You can also create a desktop icon for ever singe command and create your own remote control looking desktop, but don’t be inpatient, command via SSH take a second to work, so don’t press 10 time more loud, that will be still executed just a second later and you neighbors might not like it…
Cheers
xuedi
(previous 1G stick was 931MB) now a 1G stick will have exact 1000MB ^^