Rendering your current Clementine track in Conky

I've been using Clementine as a replacement for Amarok for the last few months (it's fairly feature complete, and you don't have to have all of KDE loaded into memory, so it is actually fast). As I also use Conky, it's only natural to want the currently playing track to be rendered in Conky. This isn't too hard, since Clementine exposes this information via dbus. You can see code to do this below:

#!/bin/bash
TRACK=`qdbus org.mpris.clementine /TrackList \
org.freedesktop.MediaPlayer.GetCurrentTrack`
qdbus org.mpris.clementine /TrackList \
org.freedesktop.MediaPlayer.GetMetadata $TRACK \
| sort -r | egrep "^(title:|artist:)" | sed -e "s/^.*: //g" \
| sed -e ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/ - /g' | head -c 36

I put this in a script called nowplaying, and when run, it gives me output in Track name - Artist format. I cut off the output after 36 characters because that's about the size of my Conky window, and songs with longer names will cause Conky to automatically resize its window, which I think is distracting. You can chop the last bit off if you don't want this. Also, although I generally prefer Artist - Track Name notation, I can usually tell who the artist is, so I listed the track name first in case the combination was over my 36 character limit. You can switch it back to Artist - Track name by removing the -r flag from the sort command above.

Now, to get this information into Conky, add a line to your ~/.conkyrc that looks something like this:

Now playing: ${execi 10 ~/config/bin/nowplaying}

Every 10 seconds, this will ping Clementine and ask it what is playing. If nothing is playing (or clementine is not running), this will simply render the empty string.