Animated cassette in conky that shows current mpd's playlist status
I once saw this wallpaper and I thought it would be cool to see it animated with reels spining and changing size according to progress of current playing music. I was using conky and I thought: why not do it in conky? And I did, it was about 2 years ago. I had also tried "porting" it to love (2d lua framework), because I thought it could run with lower cpu usage, but there was no transparent background, so it wouldn't look as cool (maybe one could just set a background and draw cassette over it, but for some reason I just wanted transparent background). I also thought about writing Xorg program that would only display this cassette - that would be fast, but as time passed I forgot about this project. I'm uploading this because it might inspire someone.
- Install Python MPD client library for python 2
- Put bin/mpd-album-duration into bin directory in your home directory
- Put .conkyrc and .conky into your home directory
- Modify .conkyrc and .conky/cassette.lua settings according to your needs
- Run
conky -c ~/.conkyrc
conky draws the cassette systematically calling (about every second) bin/mpd-album-duration script to get current position and duration of entire mpd playlist.
Only reels and 2 pieces of tape changes, so it might be changed to draw some image and mentioned parts above it. I was guessing reels spinning speed and few other things, but it looks pretty accurate. For more info check .conky/cassette.lua
- Show current playing song as a label
- Rewrite as a standalone program
- Fix reels animation to make it more smooth