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I want to know how can I get the current song information (title, artist, album etc) no matter what player is running. I saw some KDE widget can do that.

How can I do that? is there any standard protocol or interface to get song information?

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2 Answers

A simple method from the command line would be to read the output from pulseaudio to list properties of a sink input by running the following command in a terminal

pacmd list-sink-inputs

By this we can see the application that initiated a stream as well as other song properties from metatags (including artist, title, etc.) if available.

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There's no standard protocol to do that, the widget you're talking about are just handling a lot of protocols. For exemple, Amarok has is own way, VLC another etc...

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