Conky

Conky is an awesome system monitor for Linux systems. It just sits on your desktop and does, well, whatever you want it to do! And thats the beauty of it. It is extremely customizable, which makes it useful for just about everyone. For a while now I've had a cool .conkyrc (the conky config file) that calls on another script to download album art based on what music Rhythmbox is playing! There's another way to do this if you use MPD (music player daemon), but I've always used Rhythmbox, so that's what I'll write about.

My humble desktop

Basically, Conky works by reading info from your .conkyrc file, located in your home directory. In my case, it execute another file, "albumart" that downloads the album art and places it in the home directory. Conky then takes that image, and displays it along with information about the current song.

An major part of this is the conkyRhythmbox package, which you can download here. This is used to provide a way for Conky to communicate and get song information from Rhythmbox.

The next part is the album art script. Its a simple Bash script that uses wget to download the image. You can get mine here (you need to replace some stuff to fit your needs)

Then, all thats left is pointing your .conkyrc in the right direction. Here's mine. Enjoy!