Idle Media Pause

An Anki add-on that pauses your music while you are away from a card, and starts it again when you come back.

If you stop interacting with the card being shown, whatever is currently playing gets paused. When you grade the card, exactly those players start again — nothing else, and nothing that was not already playing.

Behaviour

Revealing the answer keeps the music paused on purpose — you are still on the card. Only moving on brings it back.

Three rules it never breaks:

• If nothing is playing, nothing happens. It will not start your music.
• A player you paused yourself is never resumed, because it was not playing when the timer fired and so was never recorded.
• It sends explicit Pause and Play, never the PlayPause toggle your keyboard's media key sends. A toggle fired from a timer eventually does the opposite of what you wanted.

How long is "idle"?

Eight seconds, out of the box. Change idle_seconds in the add-on config to taste.

Setting it to 0 follows the deck's Maximum answer seconds (Deck options → Timers) instead, which is Anki's own idea of how long an answer should take — 60 seconds unless you changed it, and different per deck if you set it that way. A fixed number is usually better: if you raised the deck setting to stop Anki capping your recorded answer times, the idle timeout would otherwise inherit that long value.

Requirements

Linux, and either playerctl or gdbus on your PATH. gdbus is part of GLib, so it is almost certainly already installed; playerctl is preferred when present. Any player speaking MPRIS works — Spotify, VLC, Firefox, Chromium, and most others do.

On macOS and Windows the add-on loads and does nothing.

Your card audio is unaffected: Anki runs mpv with its own config directory, which stops mpv-mpris loading, so Anki's player never appears on the bus.

Install

From AnkiWeb: not published yet.

From a release file: Tools → Add-ons → Install from file, and pick the .ankiaddon.

Configuration

Tools → Add-ons → Idle Media Pause → Config. Every setting is documented in the panel beside it; see src/idle_media_pause/config.md.

Development

./dev-install.sh     # symlink into ~/.local/share/Anki2/addons21
./build.sh           # produce dist/idle_media_pause.ankiaddon
pytest tests/        # the MPRIS layer, no Anki needed

There is a flake, so nix develop puts Anki, playerctl, GLib, zip and pytest on your PATH and none of the above needs anything else installed. Without it, build.sh still needs zip.

nix develop          # the shell the three commands above expect
nix build            # the .ankiaddon, in result/share/anki/addons
nix flake check      # the test suite

Run Anki from a terminal to see the add-on's output, and drop idle_seconds below the shipped 8 while testing — waiting out the timer on every case gets old fast.

The code splits three ways:

• mpris.py — talking to media players. No Anki imports, which is what makes it testable without a GUI. All parsing lives here.
• controller.py — the timer and the record of what was paused.
• __init__.py — hook wiring, and nothing else.

Testing against a bundled Anki

One bug only appears outside Nix and other distro packages: Anki's official Linux bundle sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH to its own Qt and GLib, and a helper that inherits it loads the wrong libraries and fails with symbol errors. mpris.build_env() strips it, the same way Anki does before launching mpv. If you change how subprocesses are spawned, test that change against an official Anki build, because a Nix or distro Anki will not reveal the breakage.

License

MIT

Who wrote this?

It's vibe coded.