- This is the plasma 5 version, the plasma 6 version is found here
- Requires "mpc" and "imagemagick" to be installed on the device showing the widget! - Make sure both are installed through your package manager!
- Set the address to your mpd server in the widget settings!
Usage Desktop Widget
- Click on cover for play/pause
- Double click cover for next song
- Scroll on the cover for volume change or use the slider
- Click on the song info text for song management
- Configure the visuals in the widget settings
Usage Song Management
- This main goal is to provide a visually driven experience. So we assume that most of your songs have embedded covers.
- All songs should have the album-artist tag filled out to show up under Artists. We assume that too.™️
- Hopefully most of the interface is self explanatory. (Of course it is!)
- Hover over interface elements for tooltips and shortcuts.
- If you see a cover-image left or right click on it, there's usually some functionality.
On Downloading Covers
Give. It. Time.
- The widget is downloading covers in the background when it thinks it needs them.
- Here MPD serves the covers at a handful of kB/s. If a certain someone put a multi-MB image into a audio-file then that cover may take a minute to load into the cache. The same applies if a audio-file is very big (long duration). - Don't force it. Give it a minute or two to churn through. Just use the widget naturally.
- While downloading many covers - mostly affecting the initial download rush after using the song-management for the first time - controlling mpd may feel sluggish or delayed. This will settle after the covers are cached locally.
- Right click on the widget cover for clearing the local cover cache. Use it in case of emergency only. This should not be necessary unless hitting a bug. Or you deliberately want to manually trigger a redownload because there are updated covers available.
Known Issues
- Clearing the cover cache doesn't immediately reload covers (requires "plasmashell --replace" OR logout/login OR close the main window for 2 minutes). - Fixed in version 6.
- Updating from mpd doesn't immediately reflect changes (requires "plasmashell --replace" OR logout/login OR close the main window for 2 minutes)
- Ctrl+F doesn't work reliably in all places. - Fixed in version 6.
- The widget sitting on the desktop displaying the current song uses little resources. That changes if you open the song management and start browsing. If you have a few thousand songs in your library you will notice that plasmashell is going to require additional RAM. Keep an eye on it if you're in a low RAM situation or have a humongous music library.
- Song management is currently optimized for running as a narrow window, so no maximizing.
- Parts of the Queue management depend on the queue not changing. If the queue is modified on the mpd server while we're busy clicking on our fancy checkboxes that selection goes down the drain. That prominently includes clients other than ours changing the queue or mpd running in "consume" mode removing songs from the queue. Shouldn't be problem on a single user mpd instance.
- Since feedback is limited so far this can only be considered a "works for me"-product at the moment. If you encounter a bug don't wait for me to fix it, I will probably not run into it. Leave some feedback.
- I used this project to learn QML from scratch, not C++. That's a mystery for another day. Maybe. One may certainly agree that mpc is not the "right" tool for the job. It just escalated and one brick fell onto another until we arrived here. If you have any suggestions about a suitable replacement feel free to chime in. - Switching to python-mpd2 in version 6.
- As of 5.x a we're still in the learning experience and iterating fast on features. So don't expect a "stable" product.
- The preference is a small, enjoyable thingy that works well rather than something big that is going to break all the time. While I would love to see dozens of other great features - you probably have ideas too - the current state does 90% of what I want and as of 5.0 feels at the edge of what is realistically supportable as a side project in the future. A 20 seconds in and out adventure to populate the queue and get something playing; not a full featured mpd client.
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