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)
Ah, you mean Spotify, the company that happily runs recruitment ads for ICE?
“I” made
At least 1/5th slop coded. First commits are from cursor agent, one fourth the additions of the main maintainer. More slop likely for the rest. Just under the main contributors name.
You can’t mit license something you didn’t write. That’s not your code to give out.
It’s generally held that you can license code that comes from tools and even though this particular example is untested it’s… unlikely that any court would strip the protection of law from companies that use llms as part of their development process.
Tbh you’re better off making a moral or ethical argument.
Nice idea to restore the original wallpaper when playback stops; that makes the customization feel less intrusive. Have you tested local MPRIS mode with players other than Spotify?
