pause-on-lock

Automatically pause your music player when the screen gets locked and resume playback, once the screen is unlocked again.

Supported desktop environments

Currently Unity, Cinnamon, GNOME, MATE, KDE, POP!_OS and XFCE are supported. The currently running desktop is detected using $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP.

Installation

Download the executable for the latest release and run

sudo install pause-on-lock /usr/local/bin/

If you don't have sudo rights or don't want a system-wide installation, change the install destination directory to e.g. $HOME/bin (and make sure that that folder is in your $PATH).

Usage

Rhythmbox and Spotify

By default pause-on-lock supports Rhythmbox and Spotify. If you use no other players, no further configuration is needed, you can simply run pause-on-lock.

User defined player

With the --player or -p flag you can provide the name of one additional player that pause-on-lock will then handle. The player needs to provide a MPRIS D-Bus interface (which is the case for most common media players) and the name you provide needs to match the name used for the D-Bus interface. For example vlc provides a D-Bus interface at org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.vlc so all you need to do is call pause-on-lock -p vlc and pause-on-lock will pause any running vlc instance when you lock your screen.

tl;dr pause-on-lock --player NAME should work in most cases.

Playerctl

If you want support for many different players and you have playerctl installed, you can use the --playerctl or -c flag to enable playerctl support in pause-on-lock. Then all players that playerctl can handle are supported, without the need for further configuration.

Autostart

I strongly recommend to add the pause-on-lock executable to Startup Applications (or the equivalent for your desktop environment), so it is run every time you log in.