[Solved] Audacious and Conky in few easy steps !
Scribbled on Thursday, February 26th, 2009Recently I started using Audacious for playing audio files. Its the alternative to XMMS for Linux when development of XMMS halted. One thing I really like about it is that it is fast, low memory footprint and sleek UI.

Then yesterday I installed Conky - a system status display (like CPU usage, RAM usage, Net speed etc.). I studied it’s documentation and found that it has audacious built in support, that it can display whats playing in audacious, track metadata and player status. As it came out it didn’t work as my Conky 1.5.1 was not compiled with support for audacious.
But after a lot of searching I found that Audacious comes with a built in command line utility Audtool which can be used to get information. Like if you want to get track name then executing audtool –current-song will show you current track playing in Audacious. Likewise you can retrieve many other information like metadata or player status.

Here are the steps to customize Conky to display song data from Audacious:
- Open .conkyrc file
- Add this line in it to show current song name
- Start conky from command line
- Thats it, you can use othe options too with audtool. Here is a list of them.
- –current-song
- Returns current song title.
- –current-song-filename
- Returns current song filename.
- –current-song-length
- Returns current song length.
- –current-song-length-seconds
- Returns current song length in seconds.
- –current-song-length-frames
- Returns current song length in frames.
- –current-song-output-length
- Returns current song output length.
- –current-song-output-length-seconds
- Returns current song output length in seconds.
- –current-song-output-length-frames
- Returns current song output length in frames.
- –current-song-bitrate
- Returns current song bitrate in bits per second.
- –current-song-bitrate-kbps
- Returns current song bitrate in kilobits per second.
- –current-song-frequency
- Returns current song frequency in hertz.
- –current-song-frequency-khz
- Returns current song frequency in kilohertz.
- –current-song-channels
- Returns current song channels.

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2 Responses to “[Solved] Audacious and Conky in few easy steps !”
Please write a conkyrc file for me…
I have been using the default one for a LONG time. I lack the artistic touch you know
One question, what amount of CPU/RAM conky takes on your machine? I have been having some trouble with mine.
By Aditya on Sun 01st Mar, 2009
@Aditya
Mine conkyrc is just the basic one, no frills.
But for you requirement here is a good tut by Filledvoid with his conkyrc file:
http://www.filledvoid.com/2008/01/08/conky-a-light-system-monitor/
By T on Thu 05th Mar, 2009