(Suggestion) Use media-control to get media play status instead

[yuchaaa]

Hello, first of all, thanks for sharing the config!

I tried using your config but the media plugin didn't work for some reason with Apple Music (Currently on macOS Sequoia 15.6.1)

I was going to make a PR but somehow my extra branch also included all my previous commits on the main branch after forking it (for my own configs).

I found this tool called media-control. The author mentioned that it's experimental though, but I find it also able to play literally anything even from YouTube on Firefox/Chromium, etc. If you run media control get -h it returns a JSON that I think that it is relatively safe to assume that the playbackRate value is safe enough to tell whether a media is paused/being played.

Here's a snippet I tinkered around with it. I purely use Apple Music for this example, but you can add more app IDs using the bundleIdentifier values if you want. I was lazy so I just used Copilot in VSCode for it, but it helped getting it working on my side.

plugins/music.sh

#!/bin/bash

ICON_PLAY=" "
ICON_PAUSE=" "
ICON_NOMEDIA="󰝛 "
MEDIA_JSON=$(media-control get -h)

# Default case for fallback
if [ -z "$MEDIA_JSON" ]; then
  sketchybar --set $NAME icon="$ICON_PLAY" \
                         label="Player Not Open" \
                         drawing=on
  exit 0
fi
BUNDLE_ID=$(echo "$MEDIA_JSON" | jq -r '.bundleIdentifier')
PLAYBACK_RATE=$(echo "$MEDIA_JSON" | jq -r '.playbackRate')
TITLE=$(echo "$MEDIA_JSON" | jq -r '.title')
ARTIST=$(echo "$MEDIA_JSON" | jq -r '.artist')

# Check if the media source is NOT Apple Music
if [ "$BUNDLE_ID" != "com.apple.Music" ]; then
  sketchybar --set $NAME drawing=on \
						 icon="$ICON_NOMEDIA" \
						 label="None Detected - Open Apple Music"
  exit 0
fi

# Do these only if Apple Music is running (i.e. it appears as the only Now Playing widget in the Control Center)
if [ "$PLAYBACK_RATE" -gt 0 ]; then
  sketchybar --set $NAME icon="$ICON_PLAY" \
                         label="$TITLE - $ARTIST" \
                         drawing=on
else
  sketchybar --set $NAME icon="$ICON_PAUSE" \
                         label="$TITLE - $ARTIST" \
                         drawing=on
fi

English isn't my primary language, but I hope it's understandable enough. Do try it out though.

[iandol]

I also can't get the music.sh script to work (macoOS 26 public beta), I just see the 􀊄 triangle icon, and I don't quite know how to debug it (pehaps the JSON fields have changed)?

[ungive]

You shouldn't use -h in scripts, as explained in the help of the media-control command. It's just for debugging. 😄

[iandol]

@ungive: thanks for the advice and thanks for a lovely tool, it solves all the problems with aerospace (using update_freq instead of subscribe to trigger it) and adds lots of nice features, totally worth the extra dependency...