Cmus Album Art

cmus

I’ve been using cmus as my music player for a while now. It’s small, fast, and simple with vim-like keybindings, and you can configure it to run an external script to display status changes. I wrote a script to change my desktop background to the album art of whatever song is currently playing.

beets

This only works with a well organized music library with art for every album. I use beets. Beets organizes a music library so that every album’s directory follows this format: /path/to/music/albumartist/album/. With the help of some plugins, it can also fetch album art, embed it in .mp3’s, and save it as cover.jpg in the album’s directory. I’ve configured beets to resize album art to a max width of 500 for consistency. Most album art seems to be 500x500 anyway.

Here is my config.yaml

directory: /home/andrew/music
library: /home/andrew/music/library.blb
plugins: fetchart missing embedart
fetchart:
    maxwidth: 500

cmus notify script

cmus calls your status display script with a series of key-value pairs as arguments. I started with this script, and added some functionality to set the background.

We need the filepath of the album art. For that we need the album artist and album title. The album title is easy: it’s passed in as one of the key value pairs. The album artist is not. We can, however, get it using cmus-remote.

ALBUMARTIST=$(cmus-remote -Q | grep -w albumartist | cut -d" " -f 3- | sanitize_path)

cmus-remote -Q to “Get player status information”, grep -w albumartist picks out the line with the album artist, and cut -d" " -f 3- to keep the 3rd field to the end of the line, where fields are delimited by a space. As for sanitize_path, beets translates some characters to underscores when creating directories, so we’ll use a sed pipeline to follow suit.

sanitize_path() {
    sed 's/\.$/_/g' \
    | sed 's@/@_@g' \
    | sed 's/:/_/g' \
    | sed 's/Various Artists/Compilations/g' \
    | sed 's/\?/_/g' \
    | sed 's/\*/_/g'
}

Finally, we have the path

ALBUM=$(echo "$_album" | sanitize_path)
PATH="$HOME/music/$ALBUMARTIST/$ALBUM/cover.jpg"

We can use feh or similar to set the background

feh --bg-center --save "$PATH"

Full script available as a gist

To install, run :set status_display_program=/path/to/cmus-notify.sh inside cmus.