Adding album cover art

MusicPlayerPlus includes the really nice character based mpd client mpcplus. It has all the functionality one would need, but sadly it has no built-in way of showing album art for the current playing song as rendering images via a terminal emulator is pretty tricky.

MusicPlayerPlus includes commands and tmux integration to enable the display of album cover art in a tmux pane alongside mpcplus and mppcava. What follows is a technical deepdive into how this was accomplished.

Here you will learn how to include album art in your mpcplus client and include the mppcava spectrum visualizer while browsing songs. Luckily, you will not have to copy and paste these files and setup the system yourself. The MusicPlayerPlus package contains all the configuration, scripts, dependencies, and a convenience startup command. To run mpcplus with spectrum visualization and album art all you need to do is execute the mpcplus-tmux command. If your music library contains album art in the album folders then it will be displayed alongside the visualizer and MPD client.

The final result would be something like this:

MusicPlayerPlus With Album Art

Prerequisites

To start off, a few dependencies need to be installed:

tmux (to encapsulate everything in one window)
inotify-tools (for changing album art when switching songs)
ueberzug (for image rendering)
ffmpeg (used in scaling the album art)
mpc (cli client for MPD)

Tmux

Tmux should already be installed either as a base package for your Linux distribution or as a MusicPlayerPlus dependency. If it is not installed (try type -p tmux) then install tmux with:

sudo apt install tmux

Inotify-tools

Install inotify-tools with:

sudo apt install inotify-tools

Ueberzug

Install Ueberzug with:

python -m pip install ueberzug

Ffmpeg

Install ffmpeg with:

sudo apt install ffmpeg

Mpc

Mpc should already be installed as a MusicPlayerPlus dependency. If it is not installed (try type -p mpc) then install mpc with:

sudo apt install mpc

Setup

Displaying cover images

The basic idea is that each time the song changes it triggers a script that searches for an album cover and copies it in /tmp as album_cover.png. Another script listens for changes on that file and renders the new image in the terminal.

Start by creating a script named album_cover.sh in ~/.config/mpcplus/:

source "`ueberzug library`"

function add_cover {
  ImageLayer::add [identifier]="img" [x]="1" [y]="2" [path]="${COVER}"
}

if [ -f ${HOME}/.config/mpcplus/config ]
then
  MPCDIR=".config/mpcplus"
else
  if [ -f ${HOME}/.mpcplus/config ]
  then
    MPCDIR=".mpcplus"
  else
    mppinit
    MPCDIR=".config/mpcplus"
  fi
fi

COVER=${HOME}/${MPCDIR}/album_cover.png

ImageLayer 0< <(
if [ ! -f "${COVER}" ]; then
  cp ${HOME}/${MPCDIR}/default_cover.png ${COVER}
fi
while inotifywait -q -q -e close_write "${COVER}"; do
  add_cover
done
)

This is going to listen for album cover changes and render them.

If no album cover for the current song is found, a default image will be selected. Be sure to add one named default_cover.png in ~/.config/mpcplus/.

Now create cover_obs.sh in the same directory:

if [ -f ${HOME}/.config/mpcplus/config ]
then
  MPCDIR=".config/mpcplus"
else
  if [ -f ${HOME}/.mpcplus/config ]
  then
    MPCDIR=".mpcplus"
  else
    mppinit
    MPCDIR=".config/mpcplus"
  fi
fi

COVER="${HOME}/${MPCDIR}/album_cover.png"
COVER_SIZE="400"

mpd_music=`grep ^music_directory /etc/mpd.conf`
if [ "${mpd_music}" ]
then
  MUSIC_DIR=`echo ${mpd_music} | awk ' { print $2 } ' | sed -e "s/\"//g"`
else
  mpd_music=`grep ^mpd_music_dir ${HOME}/${MPCDIR}/config`
  if [ "${mpd_music}" ]
  then
    MUSIC_DIR=`echo ${mpd_music} | awk ' { print $3 } '`
  else
    MUSIC_DIR=${HOME}/Music
  fi
fi

file="${MUSIC_DIR}/$(mpc --format %file% current)"
album="${file%/*}"
art=$(find "${album}"  -maxdepth 1 | grep -m 1 ".*\.\(jpg\|png\|gif\|bmp\)")
if [ "${art}" = "" ]; then
  art="${HOME}/${MPCDIR}/default_cover.png"
fi
ffmpeg -loglevel 0 -y -i "${art}" -vf "scale=${COVER_SIZE}:-1" "${COVER}"

This is the script executed when switching songs. It searches for images in the directory of the current song.

Here I chose a render size of 400 x 400, but it can be anything.

Tell mpcplus to execute it every time the song changes by adding this to ~/.config/mpcplus/config-art.conf

    execute_on_song_change = "~/.config/mpcplus/cover_obs.sh"

And don’t forget to make them executable

    chmod +x album_cover.sh
    chmod +x cover_obs.sh

Wrapping everything in one window

As mentioned above, we use tmux to run multiple terminal based programs in a single window so that everything fits nicely (i.e. an instance of mpcplus, an instance of mppcava, and one terminal running our image rendering script).

MusicPlayerPlus includes commands that start a tmux session and configures the tmux panes. Start a tmux session displaying mpcplus, the mppcava spectrum visualizer, and album art in separate tmux panes by executing the command:

mpcplus-tmux