Xmms2 Widgets

How to control xmms2d through widgets

This article describes how to make a music player widget for xmms2. It contains play/pause, next and previous track buttons and displays artist - title of the current song. Preview[1]

Requires:

• awesome >= 2.1-rc1
• awesome-client
• xmms2 (daemon and default client)
• these icons [2] [3] [4]

Adjusting your .awesomerc

---

This is the part of my .awesomerc defining the widgets. I use a textbox for the status-display of xmms2d and iconboxes for the control buttons. As you can see I put the icons in ~/.config/awesome/icons/xmms2/, I suggest you to do it the same way, it is some standard and quite a good place for your awesome customizations. You can make your own icons of course, they have to be in .png format as far as I know. Remember that awesome will crash through clicking on a widget with a wrong image path.

       textbox nowplaying {
               text = "-" #the - will be replaced by `xmms2 current` piped to awesome-client
       }
       iconbox xmms2_prev {
               image = "/home/wakeup/.config/awesome/icons/xmms2/prev.png"
               #on left mouse button click xmms2 prev will be executed as if in a terminal
               mouse {
                       button = "1"
                       command = "spawn"
                       arg = "xmms2 prev"
               }
       }
       iconbox xmms2_toggleplay {
               image = "/home/wakeup/.config/awesome/icons/xmms2/toggleplay.png"
               mouse {
                       button = "1"
                       command = "spawn"
                       arg = "xmms2 toggleplay"
               }
       }
       iconbox xmms2_next {
               image = "/home/wakeup/.config/awesome/icons/xmms2/next.png"
               mouse {
                       button = "1"
                       command = "spawn"
                       arg = "xmms2 next"
               }
       }

Script to update "artist - title"

---

My update-script is located at ~/.config/awesome/scripts/nowplaying and of really simple nature. It is started through the following line in ~/.xinitrc

/home/wakeup/.config/awesome/scripts/nowplaying &

The script

#!/bin/bash
while true
do
       song=`xmms2 current`
       echo "0 widget_tell nowplaying $song" | /usr/local/bin/awesome-client #tells the textbox-widget mentioned above to display the output of `xmms2 current`
       sleep 3
done

Another option for the script is to use [5]. This script supports on-broadcast/signal messaging, so that you don't have to wait 3 seconds for a song update. It also handles changing the icon of the play/pause button depending on the playback state. It also includes (commented out) support for working with cover art and playtime.