polybar-spotify-go

Small script to get Spotify control to work with Polybar. This is almost identical to the Python version, rewritten in GO and without the necessity of getting the song title every second.

Compared to the Python version this is 4-6 times faster and also uses Dbus signals to track song and playbackstatus changes, without polling.

Spotify Control and Polybar

In order to have this to work you need to simply download a release or build it in your machine.

wget https://github.com/Sudneo/spotify-cmd-go/releases/download/${RELEASE}/polybar-spotify-go -O ~/polybar-scripts/polybar-spotify-go

Idea

The idea is to have a simple way to see Spotify music playing and simple controls to pause/play songs and to go to previous/next song.

Limitations

The main limitation is that Spotify application doesn't expose the current position in the song, so we cannot show a fancy progress bar of the song. It could be possible to use a timer and signals to check when a new song started, but without information about changing the position in the song it would have several issues.

Configuration

I deliberately wrote a script that could do all I needed and then split the functionalities in different polybar modules.

The result was something like the following:

[...]
font-3 = "Inconsolata:size=8;0"
[...]
modules-left = spotify-song spotify-backward spotify-status spotify-forward

[...]
[module/spotify-song]
type = custom/script
exec = ~/polybar-scripts/polybar-spotify-go -justify 55 -album
tail = true
format = %{F#8a1a0b}%{F-} <label>
format-background = ${colors.black}
format-underline = ${colors.red}
format-padding = 4
label = %{T4}%output%%{T-}

[module/spotify-backward]
type = custom/script
exec = ~/polybar-scripts/polybar-spotify-go -prevIcon
click-left = ~/polybar-scripts/polybar-spotify-go -prev
interval = 60
format = <label>
format-background = ${colors.black}
format-underline = ${colors.red}
format-padding = 4

[module/spotify-status]
type = custom/script
exec = ~/polybar-scripts/polybar-spotify-go -playpause-icon
tail = true
click-left = ~/polybar-scripts/polybar-spotify-go -playpause
format = <label>
format-background = ${colors.black}
format-underline = ${colors.red}
format-padding = 4

[module/spotify-forward]
type = custom/script
exec = ~/polybar-scripts/polybar-spotify-go -nextIcon
click-left = ~/polybar-scripts/polybar-spotify-go -next
interval = 60
format = <label>
format-background = ${colors.black}
format-underline = ${colors.red}
format-padding = 4

Few things to notice:

• The custom font usage in the spotify-song block is not casual. Since the blocks are separated, the best result is obtained with monospace fonts, so that the width of the block is fixed.
• When Spotify is not Running, the script doesn't print anything at all, so the whole block will basically disappear.
• Depending on Polybar polling time, the "next" and "previous" icons might take a while to come up if Spotify gets launched once Polybar is running (1 minute by default)

Outcome

When a song is playing, the result is like this:

When a song is paused, the result is like this:

Note that the script trims or pads the output to a fixed amount of characters, that together with a monospace font produce the result of a fixed width polybar block.

Why in GO

Previously I have used Python and I was not happy with performances, I noticed quite often the script running from process list. Moreover, having a simple binary already compiled that does not require any other dependency is extremely convenient in my opinion.