My Writings - Linux tips, articles and hacks

adding a "Now playing SONG_TITLE" to your emails

Last Updated (Tuesday, 30 November 1999 00:00) Sunday, 15 August 2004 13:57

Someone once posed a question a on a mailing list I am on. He wanted to add a line at the end of his emails telling about what song was currently playing on his XMMS. Something like "Currently listening to Nirvana -  Smells like the teen spirit". This is what I did

First create a file songch.sh with the following lines
#!/bin/bash
echo Now listening to $@ > mysong.txt
Put it in your home directory and then do a chmod a+x songch.sh on it so that everyone has execute permissions on it. Next, start XMMS, goto Preferences, and in the Effect/General Plugins tab, select the Song Change plugin's properties. Specify ~/.songch.sh %s in the properties box. What happens now is that whenever a song changes, its name is put in the mysong.txt file (in your home directory).

The next part is dependent on your email client. In most good mail clients (like Mozilla Thunderbird) you can attach a file as a signature. Use mysong.txt as your  signature file and that should be all.