MusicScroll

I don't like having to fire up a browser to get the lyrics of the songs I am currently hearing. I got basic needs, I download songs with good metadata and use SMPlayer to open the playlists. It would be nice if somehow I could get a basic windows with the lyrics of the song.

MusicScroll does this. When you run the command music-scroll a window is opened with the lyrics of the song your are playing on SMPlayer and each change of song will retrieve new lyrics without your intervention.

This works by getting the MPRIS info on your song, specifically the title and artists fields. After some clean up it will retrieve the lyrics from a lyrics website, clean the HTML a little and put it as text on a GTK window. Ideally it ought be not invasive so you can read only if you want.

This was done as an excuse to learn more of gi-gtk & glade. But I am happy with the result so I am sharing. On the future I would like do write the lyrics to a SQLite database for offline usage and handle other videoplayers as VLC (this ought to be really easy, send a patch).

I want to thanks to the haskell-gi and haskell dbus authors. I didn't know much about graphics programming or dbus, but the documentation, types and code samples helped me a lot on understanding how they ought to be organized. If I see you guys on a conference I will buy you a beer :-) . The d-feet program was really helpful for see how the data was layout on DBus.