mpd-wallpaper

Ever wanted to display currently playing song's artwork as a wallpaper? No?.. Well, you can now, so why not try it!

This script runs as a daemon which takes the currently playing track in MPD and uses some (image)magick to set it's artwork as the wallpaper of your desktop.

It's kinda clever, though, so unlike kunst it gets your music path from the mpd config.

Note that it can't handle absolute paths (they are only used if you connect to mpd via unix socket and play a track that isn't in your library).

Introduction

One day I was thinking something like "Huh, it'd be cool to have some kind of album art in ncmpcpp... But setting up image display in alacritty is probably complicated... Hey, there is kunst, which also displays the artwork in a notification and activates on ncmpcpp's song change activity and there's an option to make the alacritty's background a bit transparent, so it'd be great to have a script to change the wallpaper to the playing track's artwork!"

And just like that I started writing this script. But then I also thought that it'd be better to make it independent of ncmpcpp and make it launch at system startup, so here we are.

Requirements

Common:

• bash
• dunst (*optional, used for notifications)
• imagemagick
• kid3-cli
• mpc
• mpd (duh)

X11:

• feh

Wayland:

• swww
• wlr-randr

Usage

mpd-wallpaper -f fallback_image [-h] [-n] [-b bottom_indent] [-B border] [-d ditherlevel] [-D downscaling] [-m args] [-r HxV] [-t top_indent]

For example,

mpd-wallpaper -f ~/Pictures/Wallpapers/GiTS/1.png -n -t 22 -B 4 -m -d 8 -D 2

On wayland, you will also have to have the swww daemon running.

To avoid overusing the launch options, swww is launched without any options. If you want to change them, simply set the corresponding environment variables. You can get the list of available options and their corresponding environment variable names by running swww img --help.

Screenshots

desktop

dithering

ncmpcpp

Notes

P.S.: this script with dithering and downscaling enabled plays very nicely with dithered fading effects for picom. Or, if you're feeling particularly old-school, you can even use it with both dithered fading and fake dithering!