Getting Track Information With Nall

If you have a graphical desktop with a system tray conforming to the freedesktop recommendations (such as trayer, gnome-panel notification area, …) you can use nall to schedule a (almost) one-line script that will display the current song information. Once nall installed, if your shell-fm is run as a networked daemon, you just have to put the following script into ~/.nall/3listening :

#!/bin/sh
HOST=192.168.0.1
PORT=54311
echo info | nc $HOST $PORT

This will tell nall to run the probe every 3 seconds, and to write listening: as the tooltip title. Don't forget to replace HOST and PORT values according to your configuration.

If shell-fm is running on your local machine, you can either write a script to write/read on the UNIX socket, or, (easier?) reading to a file written by shell-fm (configured to write-out the song title).