Via xbindkeys I have the buttons on my generic multimedia keyboard setup so they control xmms.

This works very well, I can skip to the next track when the "next" button is pressed by executing "xmms -fwd", etc.

One thing bugging me for a while is that the command line interface to xmms doesn't allow you to teak the volume, so I couldn't bnd the "++" and "--" keys to anything useful.

I wrote a quick patch to control the xmms volume from the command line, and mailed the -dev mailing list.

So far the consensus is that I should be mapping keys to the mixer instead - no positive feedback at all.

Oh well the patch is sufficiently trivial that I'll keep it for the time being - until the next Debian package is released and my installed copy gets overwritten I guess.