Radio Box Widget

I like to listen to radio when I am working on my computer. Usually, I listen to FIP radio, the track information played by this radio are very cools and smooths (example for one day : here) but of course I don't use their ugly player or their information popup ...

Guess what, I want to display the tracks I'm listening on my desktop in a conky ;-)
But as there are more radios than "FIP radio" and because the script was not difficult to write, the conky came more "universal" (sorry, a big word for a little thing).
You need conky 1.8.0 because the script use cairo_text_extents_t structure for text alignment.

The script can be downloaded from ubuntu forums : here.

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First, I said I don't want a ugly player, so I use vlc with the http interface, like this :

vlc --intf=http http://www.tv-radio.com/station/fip_mp3/fip_mp3-128k.m3u

there are others interfaces or others methods to hide a player but I like vlc!

I can control volume with my keyboard or with my browser at this address :

http://localhost:8080/

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The conky itself doesn't get the track information. This is done by a bash script, (I made one for FIP here but for others radios, you have to work a little bit ...) which write the information in a text file.
So, the conky needs only this text file in input with at least one of the lines bellow (order doesn't matter):

radio:__FIP radio__
artist:Sonny Rollins
title:Come, Gone
album:Way out West
label:Contemporary
year:1957
cover:/tmp/radio-cover

I will call this file : /tmp/radio.txt

In the conkyrc, as usual, call the Lua script :

lua_load ~/scripts/radio-box.lua
lua_draw_hook_post main_radio_box /tmp/radio.txt
TEXT
${execi 15 ~/scripts/generate-track-information.sh}

You can see that the main_radio_box function needs one parameter : the track information file generated by the generate-track-information.sh.
In fact, the function can have 17 parameters but only the first one is mandatory.

If you run the script with only the first parameter, you get that :

useless, isn't it ?

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Now, let's add some parameters on the main function :
The x, y coordinates of the top-left corner, to move the box :

lua_draw_hook_post main_radio_box /tmp/radio.txt 100 25

The font and the font size, to change the display :

lua_draw_hook_post main_radio_box /tmp/radio.txt 10 10 Purisa 15

The informations to display, in the form ATBLYR where :

A=Artist
T=Track
B=Album
L=Label
Y=Year
R=Radio

Example :

lua_draw_hook_post main_radio_box /tmp/radio.txt 10 10 Japan 15 RATBLY

Here you can see that the box auto-fit the text, both in height and width.

The cover.
If your script get the cover, you can display it, just set the path in the file /tmp/radio.txt. To display, the cover use 1, other caracter to not display.

lua_draw_hook_post main_radio_box /tmp/radio.txt 10 10 Japan 15 RATBLY 1

If there is less text to dispaly, the cover will resize to the height of the text frame, like this

lua_draw_hook_post main_radio_box /tmp/radio.txt 10 10 Japan 15 ATB 1

The border size :
(In a reel conky, you should write all the parameters on one single line)

lua_draw_hook_post main_radio_box /tmp/radio.txt 10 10 Japan 15 ATBY
         1 7

The radius of the corners:

lua_draw_hook_post main_radio_box /tmp/radio.txt 10 10 Japan 15 ATBY
         1 3 15

lua_draw_hook_post main_radio_box /tmp/radio.txt 10 10 Japan 15 ATB
         1 0 0

Bye, Sonny...


The gap between the two frames:

lua_draw_hook_post main_radio_box /tmp/radio.txt 10 10 Japan 15 ATB
         1 3 3 60

The light effect source, possibles values are :

nw : Nord-West (default)
nn : North-North
ne : North-East
ee : East-East
se : South-East
ss : South-South
sw : South-West
ww : West-West

Example for North-North :

lua_draw_hook_post main_radio_box /tmp/radio.txt 10 10 Japan 15 ATB
         1 3 3 10 nn

The colors of the frame (it's a linear gradient but if the two values are the same, there is no more gradient):

lua_draw_hook_post main_radio_box /tmp/radio.txt 10 10 Japan 15 ATB
         1 3 3 10 ee 
         FF0000  FFFF00 1 1 

The colors of the text :

lua_draw_hook_post main_radio_box /tmp/radio.txt 10 10 Japan 15
         ATB 1 3 3 10 ee 
         F00F00 FCFFC0 1 1 00FF00 00FFFF 1 1

The colors of the border (the same of the main frame if they are not defined, but inversed)

lua_draw_hook_post main_radio_box /tmp/radio.txt 10 10 Japan 15 ATB
         1 5 5 10 sw 
         CCCCCC 000000 1 1 FFFF00 FFFFFF 1 1 000000 DDDDDD 1 1

More classical :

lua_draw_hook_post main_radio_box /tmp/radio.txt 10 10 Japan 15 ATB
         1 2 0 10 ww 
         CCCCCC CCCCCC 1 1 000000 000000 1 1 000000 000000 1 1

While writing this note I add parameters for transparancy:

lua_draw_hook_post main_radio_box /tmp/radio.txt 10 10 Japan 15 ATBLY
         1 5 5 10 nw 
         000000 FFFFFF 0.3 0.3 FF0000 FF0000 0.5 0.5 000000 000000 1 0.2

I think I will add some effects on the cover if I can in the future.