Built this for myself and I’m still iterating, but I honestly really enjoy using it.

It puts a frosted-glass “now playing” card — album art, track, and artist — onto your actual desktop wallpaper, not a floating window, with a blurred cover-art backdrop. Pause or quit and your original wallpaper comes back. You can see what’s playing at a glance, even when the desktop is idle or on the screensaver. Just a nice little desktop customization.

On Linux it talks to GNOME (gsettings), KDE Plasma (plasma-apply-wallpaperimage / qdbus), XFCE (xfconf-query), or feh/swaybg/nitrogen. Windows and macOS work too. Local mode reads the OS media session (Spotify desktop; other MPRIS players may work on Linux). Optional Spotify Web API mode can follow playback on another device.

No analytics or tracking. By default, local mode may request a sharper cover from Apple’s public iTunes Search API; that can be turned off with --no-online-art.

It’s still a work in progress. Happy for testers, issues, and PRs, but mostly I just wanted to share it in case other people enjoy it too.

Install: pipx install now-playing-desktops Repo: https://github.com/hippi345/nowPlayingDesktops (MIT)

Screenshot track: “Too Cool” by Kevin MacLeod (CC BY-SA 4.0)