polybar-spotify

Small script to get Spotify control to work with Polybar

Spotify Control and Polybar

In order to have this to work you need to have

• Polybar working
• Python dbus module installed
• Python 3

Idea

The idea is to have a simple way to see Spotify music playing and simple controls to pause/play songs and to go to previous/next song.

Limitations

The main limitation is that in order to get the name of the song being played and the play/pause icon correct, the script needs to be executed often.

The second limitation is that Spotify application doesn't expose the current position in the song, so we cannot show a fancy progress bar of the song.

Configuration

I deliberately wrote a script that could do all I needed and then split the functionalities in different polybar modules.

The result was something like the following:

[...]

modules-left = spotify-song spotify-backward spotify-status spotify-forward

[...]
[module/spotify-song]
type = custom/script
exec = ~/polybar-scripts/spotify-cmd.py --playing --trim_or_pad 50
interval = 0.5
format = <label>
format-foreground = #fff
format-background = #773f3f3f
format-underline = #c9665e
format-padding = 4
label = %{T4}%output%%{T-}

[module/spotify-backward]
type = custom/script
exec = ~/polybar-scripts/spotify-cmd.py --previous_icon
click-left = ~/polybar-scripts/spotify-cmd.py --previous
format-padding = -1

[module/spotify-status]
type = custom/script
exec = ~/polybar-scripts/spotify-cmd.py --playpause_icon
click-left = ~/polybar-scripts/spotify-cmd.py --playpause
interval = 0.5
format-padding = -1

[module/spotify-forward]
type = custom/script
exec = ~/polybar-scripts/spotify-cmd.py --next_icon
click-left = ~/polybar-scripts/spotify-cmd.py --next
format-padding = -1
[bar/top]

Few things to notice:

• The custom font usage in the spotify-song block is not casual. Since the blocks are separated, the best result is obtained with monospace fonts, so that the width of the block is fixed.
• When Spotify is not Running, the script doesn't print anything at all, so the whole block will basically disappear.

Outcome

When a song is playing, the result is like this:

When a song is paused, the result is like this:

Note that the script trims or pads the output to a fixed amount of characters, that together with a monospace font produce the result of a fixed width polybar block.