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doldori

Member

Registered: 2025-11-27

Posts: 1

playerctld daemon not activating correctly, can't recognize mpd-mpris

Hello! Currently trying to get playerctl to work with both Spotify and mpd on hyprland. I installed mpd-mpris which seems to be working and correctly exposes org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.mpd on the d-bus. My problem lies with the playerctld daemon, which I want to use in order for playerctl to correctly identify which media player I'm currently using. For some reason, the daemon lies in a dormant "activatable" state when I run

playerctld daemon

in the console. I can verify this by running

busctl --user list | grep mpris

where playerctld is displayed as

org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.playerctld                - -               -       (activatable) -                 -       -

In this state, the daemon isn't functional and doesn't correctly help playerctl identify the last used player. The only way I can get the daemon to activate correctly is if I open Spotify and THEN run

playerctld daemon

, where now it is displayed as

org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.playerctld            106095 playerctld      doldori :1.23190      user@1000.service -       -

I am genuinely perplexed as to why this is happening. playerctl recognizes both mpd and spotify as players when I run playerctl -l, but it does not activate when I run playerctl daemon with just mpd running. The daemon even interacts with Spotify and mpd correctly once it is up and running. The daemon also remains running even after I close Spotify.

What does it even mean that the daemon is "activatable"? To my understanding, the daemon should change from activatable state to actually running when I issue a playerctl command with a recognized player, but this doesn't seem to be happening.

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 75,086

Re: playerctld daemon not activating correctly, can't recognize mpd-mpris

As soon as anything tries to talk to the interface "Name=" specified in /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.playerctld.service the daemon will be started.

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