Recently at work I've been using Viridan to listen to music at work. It has its warts, but generally works pretty well. There's even an XMLRPC server built in, so you can control it remotely. However, there's not a huge number of clients out there, so I wrote my own little script so that I could start and stop it from a Qtile keybinding, and I thought I'd put it up here for anyone else who is interested. Here's an example session:

smitten:~$ ./vif.py 
./vif.py [rpc_call(s)]
   availible methods are:
     get_current_song
     get_state
     get_volume
     next
     play_pause
     prev
     set_volume
     volume_down
     volume_up
smitten:~$ ./vif.py get_current_song
{'artist_name': 'Meshuggah','song_title': 'Stengah', ...}
smitten:~$ ./vif.py next
True

Hopefully someone else finds it useful :-)