Get album art from rhythmbox on the command line (conky)

**pieroxy** · May 2nd, 2014

Hello there. I'm looking for a way to extract my currently playing album cover art (that's for my conky).

I've found a few things here and there all advocating the same thing: Covers are in /home/USER/.cache/rhythmbox/covers/ARTIST - ALBUM.jpg.

The thing is it doesn't look like they are there anymore. I can see a folder at /home/USER/.cache/rhythmbox/album-art (notice the difference already), but the files are named 000000, 000001, etc and there's a store.tbd file along with this. But the currently playing album cover art seems to be in there.

Does anyone has any idea?

**kostkon** · May 3rd, 2014

You can always use D-Bus calls to get the album art. Rhythmbox (and many other players, including the linux version of the Spotify desktop client) implement the MPRIS interface. So you can create something that will be player agnostic.

**pieroxy** · May 3rd, 2014

Thanks for the tip. I have tried a few tutos out there, with the same results:

A) When I try a simple program :

Code:

#! /usr/bin/env python
import dbus

session_bus = dbus.SessionBus()

proxy_obj = session_bus.get_object(
    'org.gnome.Rhythmbox', '/org/gnome/Rhythmbox/Player')

player = dbus.Interface(proxy_obj, 'org.gnome.Rhythmbox.Player')

print player.getPlayingUri()

I always get the following exception:
dbus.exceptions.DBusException: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.gnome.Rhythmbox was not provided by any .service files

B) conkyRhythmbox.py always gives me Unknown (or 0) no matter what datatype i put in...

Any idea? I've tried this with rhythmbox playing, paused, stopped, closed to no avail... rhythmbox-client works fine and gives me (almost) everything I need. (just the cover art is missing)

**kostkon** · May 4th, 2014

Yeah, that does not work. You need to use a different interface to get the mpris metadata from Rhythmbox. And the object path you used for Rhythmbox is wrong. Anyway, the following code should do it:

Code:

sb = dbus.SessionBus()

rb_obj = sb.get_object("org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.rhythmbox", "/org/mpris/MediaPlayer2")

props_int = dbus.Interface(rb_obj, "org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties")

rb_meta_dict = props_int.Get("org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player", "Metadata")

title = rb_meta_dict["xesam:title"]
artists = ", ".join(rb_meta_dict["xesam:artist"]) # track can have more than one artist apparently
album = rb_meta_dict["xesam:album"]
cover_art_url = meta_dict["mpris:artUrl"]
# etc...

By doing the above you are getting the metadata dict that contains all the info for the current track (and thus you don't really need to use rhythmbox-client at all.) The full list of the metadata items can be found here. Beware that some values are dbus arrays and you should handle them accordingly like I've done for the artists above.

Hope that helps.