mpd-notification-daemon

A small program to send desktop notifications when MPD changes track.

Why Does This Exist?

Some desktop environments (in my case awesome and hyprland) don't send notifications related to MPD. A number of MPD clients have scripting that can be used to do this however this requires leaving the client open so I created this program to do it in the background regardless of environment.

Configuration

Name	Description
cover_art_method	How the cover art for the icon retrieved can be 'None', 'LocalHack', 'Native' see below for a description of each.
music_directory	Only applies when cover_art_method is 'LocalHack', the directory should match the music directory in ~/.config/mpd/mpd.conf or leave missing to automatically detect from ~/.config/mpd/mpd.conf
notification_timeout	Timeout in milliseconds, leave missing for system default.
max_connection_retries	Max connection retries, 0 for unlimited.
format	The format of the notification body text. currently supports %Artist, %Album, %Title, %Date and \n new lines. %Artist is gathered from the MPD AlbumArtist tag or if missing falls back to the Artist tag. The Artist tag will also be used if AlbumArtist is "Various Artists"

Cover Art Methods

• 'None' - Don't show any cover art.
• 'LocalHack' - Simply grabs the cover art path from the local filesystem to reduce IO, you will likely run into problems running MPD setups such as a remote server or having more than a single music directory mounted.
• 'Native' - Uses an MPD command to get the image, this transfers the whole high resolution image across the connection. this requires the albumart feature flag as it uses unstable features.