XFCE MPRIS Plugin

Note: this is a fork of https://github.com/macr1408/XFCE-Spotify-Plugin, modified to support all MPRIS2 players, instead of just Spotify via the Spotify Web API.

This plugin integrates MRPIS Now Playing feature with XFCE Panel.

Features

• Shows the current song playing
• On hover, show additional song info (the album name by default)
• Click to open song link in browser
• (Optional) See album art (disabled by default cuz it requires python)

What are the requirements for this?

• XFCE (well, technically just the XFCE panel. this plugin should work on any WM/DE the panel will run on)
• XFCE Plugin: Genmon (Generic Monitor)
• D-Bus
• Python3 (for image support)

Genmon usually comes in the "xfce4-goodies" package for your distribution.

Installation

Installing this plugin

1. Download/clone this repo to somewhere you want the program to live
2. Cd into the folder that was downloaded, then make xfce-mpris-main.sh executable: cd XFCE-MPRIS-Plugin && chmod +x xfce-mpris-main.sh
3. Create a "Generic Monitor" item on your panel
4. Edit properties of this "Generic Monitor" item to execute the file xfce-mpris-main.sh, hide the label (or don't, it's up to you lol), and set a period of 10 seconds
5. Enjoy!

Image support (requires python3)

To enable album artwork display:

1. Run this command to install the required python dependencies: python3 -m pip install python-resize-image pillow wget
2. Change IMGENABLE to "true" in config.sh, and optionally (but recommended) edit IMGSIZE to match your panel height.

F.A.Q

Can I change the format (ex. Artist - Song Title)?

Yes. You can edit OUTFORMAT in config.sh.

Does this plugin show real time info?

Technically it doesn't, but it refreshes every 10 seconds (you can even lower down this number in the genmo settings) so it emulates being in real time

But I want real time info about the current playing song, I will lower down the refresh time to 1 second...

Sure, go for it! Since we're getting the song data locally, we are not limited to how often we can get it. However, keep in mind that you will be setting a series of commands to run every X seconds, so try to set this value to something sensible (especially if you have low-end hardware).

What was the motivation for making this fork?

I was having issues with getting the Spotify API to work, I believe their API has changed causing the original project to break (I don't remember the error). It might work fine... and I may just be stupid, but I spent about an hour reading Spotify docs trying to get it working with no success, and decided using something else would be easier. Using D-Bus directly is a much simpler and cleaner way to get music data.

Credits

• Genmon for making this possible, and being very easy to work with
• All the StackOverflow community with their answers
• macr1408 for original code, userbyte to avoid using the Spotify Web API