Zik Music Player

A simple shell script music player that does what I want my ideal music player to do. It is meant to be run in the background and interacted with using a dmenu interface and notify-send alerts. The menu can be easily opened by binding the script to a key. When a song starts playing, the album cover art is set as the wallpaper.

Requirements

Program	Why
dmenu	Prompts
ffmpeg	Extract art and metadata
ffprobe	Get video channel res
ffplay	Playback audio
wget	Fetch art from the web
feh	Set wallpaper

Quick start

Prompt the options (see Usage) with dmenu:

zik

By default the Menu option finds (recursively) all audio files (wav, mp3, flac, ogg) in the $HOME/Music directory. This can be configured by changing variables in the script.

Installation

Put it somewhere in your path.

Usage

Usage: zik [--help|add <file>|menu|skip|pause|resume|stop|reset]
    Without any option, a dmenu prompt is opened to choose one.

    Options:
    --help      Print this message.
    add <file>  Add the file to the queue.
    menu        Open a menu to choose a file to add..
    skip        Go to next in queue.
    pause       Pause playback.
    resume      Resume playback.
    stop        Empty the queue and stop playing.
    reset       Remove the fifo file (use if something went wrong)."

How it works

Queue

The script can start a daemon (if it's not already running) to plays audio files from a queue with ffplay -nodisp. The queue is materialized by a fifo/named pipe which holds file names, by default it is created automatically as $HOME/.zik/fifo. You can interact with the queue using the script itself.

Controls

The skip/pause/resume commands work by sending the TERM/STOP/CONT signals respectively to the daemon's ffplay child. To stop the daemon, a TERM signal is sent which stops the audio playback cleanly. Again, you can use the script instead of sending kill commands manually.

Cover art

When playing a song the album cover art is fetched. First it looks in the cache in $HOME/.zik/covers. Then if there's a large enough (MIN_WIDTH variable) picture in the audio file it is extracted with ffmpeg. Otherwize the MusicBrainz and Cover Art Archive APIs are used to find the image. Finally the wallpaper is set with feh

TODO

• notify-send blocking when dunst not running ? Skip it or send in the background ?
• Playlist/list files
• Stream audio from web sources
• Find a "Cover.jpg", be aware of capitalization / extension
• coverartarchive always jpg ?
• Chop file extension in selection menu
• Rewrite signal stuff with a command fifo running in parallel
• Force empty the queue when starting (?)
• Make it more configurable : MENU_PROMPT, WALLPAPER, PLAYER(?) vars
• Query command(s) to get the time from ffplay stdout / the artist, title, metadata...
• volume control ?
• ZIK_PATH(?) as env var / multiple paths foo/bar:/home/bazz/music:another_dir/...
• make it work with directories, adding ordered by track number
• blur the wallpaper so it's less ugly when resized from a square, see how this guy does it with the gm program
• get the image from the web if not in the audio file by using ffmpeg to find the album name in the metadata
• add the artist and album to the search prompt (so it can be searched for more easily just in case)
• insert music to be played next : at the "wrong end" of the queue : cat into var, add the song, then readd everything back