Called without arguments, it returns the title (filled as intelligently as
possible, whether it's a network stream or a file without metadata) of the
currently playing song to stdout, clipped and ellipsized to a width of 60
chars, and a more verbose tooltip to stderr.

it can show an icon in addition to the text, send notifications on song change,
provide player controls and more.

continue reading...

I made this when tint2 introduced a plugin to display the output of an external command.
that was 2 years ago and i've been using it ever since.

Music is almost always playing on my system, and often I need a quick glance at who is playing without having to minimize or open windows. The panel/taskbar is the perfect place for that.

recently i overhauled the script thoroughly, and is absolutely stable on my system.
it is not depending on tint2.
it currently supports mpd, audacious and mocp audio players.
it can start & stop playback (with icons) and show the UI.

i think this could be useful for others, too.

the multiple player support is confusing, but only in theory (because in practice you will most likely settle on one).

I would love to get some testing on other systems (debian based, mostly; i'm using archlinux), and, more importantly, what you think about it:

• does it have too many features? or too little?
• does it have something unique for you, that you cannot reproduce with your media player's own features?
• is something important missing?

https://github.com/ohnonot/media-player-info

there have been a few commits meanwhile; i added support for notification on song change, and album art display in the notification or in the panel output itself.
everything is configurable with command line options.

1 members found this post helpful.

the script can now also extract album art from local files.
i also fixed a glitch where enabling the -I option actually disabled the display of normal play/pause/stop icons, and improved mpd title recognition for e.g. soundcloud playlists.

somebody asked about openBSD support; it seems the BSDs don't ship with some fairly standard linux utilities. the missing pidof completely breaks the script.
anybody have an idea how i can reproduce this command:
pidof mediaplayer >/dev/null 2>&1
with utilities that are available both on bsd & linux? without using pipes or too much additional logic?
the script just needs to know whether the media player is running.

i have updated the list of dependencies and will see what i can do about it.

more bugfixing.
i already found one feature-creep-regression-sort-of bug!
i also started going throught he script with shellcheck, found a plain typo, and surely there'll be more commits for general code cleanup.

would still love some input on the openbsd thing.

I have moved all my repositories to https://framagit.org/ohnonot and https://notabug.org/ohnonot