vindauga

Download and display album art or display embedded (or folder-based) album art using a bash script; a largely rewritten fork of kunst

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Project maintained by uriel1998 Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

vindauga

Export the current album cover for conky or other desktop widgets. The script is intentionally small: it checks the active player, finds nearby cover art, rounds the corners, and writes the result to a cache file.

Contents

1. About
2. License
3. Prerequisites
4. How to use

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1. About

vindauga looks up the currently playing track from audacious first and falls back to mpd if audacious is not actively playing. It then checks the song’s directory for folder.jpg or cover.jpg. If neither exists, it falls back to the bundled default image.

The script does not open a display window and it does not run as its own loop. It runs once, updates the cached output, and exits. That makes it suitable for conky, cron, or any other periodic launcher.

The generated image is written to ${XDG_CACHE_HOME}/vindauga/nowplaying.album.png, and the current track text is written to ${XDG_CACHE_HOME}/vindauga/songinfo. If ${XDG_CACHE_HOME}/yadshow already exists, vindauga reuses it by symlinking ${XDG_CACHE_HOME}/vindauga to the same directory.

vindauga means “window”.

All of the heavier cover-art finding and synchronization logic has been moved to ffixer_covers, as outlined in this blog post.

2. License

This project is licensed under the MIT license. For the full license, see LICENSE.

3. Prerequisites

• imagemagick, specifically the convert and identify commands
• mpc for MPD support
• audtool for Audacious support

The script can still run if only one player integration is usable, but it will emit errors from whichever helper command is missing or unavailable.

4. How to use

Run vindauga.sh whenever you want to refresh the cached cover art:

./vindauga.sh

The only supported command-line option is:

./vindauga.sh -h

That prints help and exits without touching the cache.

There is an example conky config included. Throughout, replace /home/USER with your own home directory.

• ${execi 3 /path/to/vindauga.sh} refreshes the cache every 3 seconds.
• ${exec head /home/USER/.cache/vindauga/songinfo | sed 's/ - /\n/g'} splits the track info into multiple lines.
• ${image /home/USER/.cache/vindauga/nowplaying.album.png -p 0,0 -s 300x300} shows the cached cover image directly from conky.

MPD Hosts

By default, the script assumes your music library lives in ${HOME}/Music, and that album art files are named cover.jpg or folder.jpg.

If MPD_HOST is already set in the environment, vindauga uses it. Otherwise it tries to read an MPD_HOST= assignment from ${HOME}/.bashrc, which helps when conky or another non-login shell launches the script.

If your MPD instance requires a password, use the usual mpc format: MPD_HOST=password@host.

With Conky

The included vindauga_conkyrc shows one way to render the cached cover and track data in conky. Editing conky itself is outside the scope of this README, but the example file is a working starting point.

See vindauga_conkyrc for the example.

Busywork Only AI/LLM Use

An AI/LLM was used for busywork related to this repository. This may include one or more of the following: documentation, locating bugs, or commit messages.