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.

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 sound)

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.

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 desktop file is installed to /etc/xdg/autostart/, this automatically starts the program when logged in to a desktop environment.

Just run mpd-notification after installation or re-login to desktop environment for autostart.

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
• -v: verbose output

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.