mpd-notification

Notify about tracks played by mpd

This runs in background and produces notifications whenever mpd produces an event, that is new track is played or playback is paused or stopped. Notifications look like this:

This now even supports album artwork:

Read below for the details.

Requirements

To compile and run mpd-notification you need:

libav or ffmpeg
libnotify
libmpdclient
markdown (HTML documentation)
gnome-icon-theme (or anything else that includes an icon named audio-x-generic)

To use mpd-notification you probably want mpd, the music player daemon itself. ;)

Some systems may require additional development packages for the libraries. Look for libnotify-devel, libmpdclient-devel or similar.

Build and install

Building and installing is very easy. Just run:

make

followed by:

make install

This will place an executable at /usr/bin/mpd-notification, documentation can be found in /usr/share/doc/mpd-notification/. Additionally a systemd unit file is installed to /usr/lib/systemd/user/.

Usage

Just run mpd-notification to run it once. A systemd user service can be started and/or enabled with systemctl --user start mpd-notification or systemctl --user enable mpd-notification.

mpd-notification accepts some arguments:

-h: show help
-H HOST: connect to HOST
-m MUSIC-DIR: use MUSIC-DIR for artwork lookup
-p PORT: connect to PORT
-t TIMEOUT: notification timeout
-v: verbose output
-V: print version information

Artwork

mpd does not provide any information where it finds its music files. To make mpd-notification display album artwork you need to tell it where to look for artwork. You can do that by exporting XDG_MUSIC_DIR to your environment or by specifying -m or --music-dir on the command line. mpd-notification reads album artwork from mp3 files, otherwise an image file containing the artwork needs to be placed in the same directory as the media file and named cover.jpg, cover.png, folder.jpg or folder.png.

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