Notice: I did a rewrite in python which can handle more players (probably your favorite among them) by default and is also able to handle multiple players running at the same time (like if you're watching a video in your browser and listening to music on your spotify or whatever you do). It's still an early release and I'd be happy if you gave it a try and let me know if something doesn't work for you.

You can visit the github page or just install via pip install pauseonlock

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.