Can changes in the radio stream title be logged?

[kowalcj0]

Question

Is it possible to configure MPD so it logs changes in the radio stream title?

I'm aware that I can record radio streams using recorder plugin but that would simply gobble up the free space on my disk and also unnecessarily record (and transcode) locally played files.

Thanks

[MaxKellermann]

No, but you can write a small Python script which acts as a MPD client and logs all new tags. I suggest moving "special" features like this to a small and dedicated client.

[kowalcj0]

Thanks @MaxKellermann

Here's an example python script that logs to system journal and to /home/mpd/.mpd/play.log.

pip install python-musicpd systemd-python

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# coding: utf-8
from datetime import datetime

from systemd import journal
import musicpd
from musicpd import ConnectionError

def append_to_mpd_play_log(entry: str):
    with open("/home/mpd/.mpd/play.log", "a+") as log:
        log.write(entry)

def main():
    cli = musicpd.MPDClient()
    try:
        cli.connect()
        if cli.status()["state"] == "play":
            song = cli.currentsong()
            entry = f"{str(datetime.utcnow())}-MPD logger: {song['name']} -> {song['title']}\n"
            journal.send(entry)
            append_to_mpd_play_log(entry)
        cli.disconnect()
    except ConnectionError:
        pass

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

I run it every minute with simple cron job:

crontab -e
* * * * * /home/mpd/scripts/mpdlogger.py