this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
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Programming
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Back in the day, I got the weird idea that it'd be handy to grab information from the XMMS music player as it was running. So I made an extension that basically dumped the information about the player state as text to a named pipe. A few people wrote scripts for their IRC clients and whatnot to tell others what they were listening.
(Back then, none of the GUI music players really had any kind of RPC capability. Nowadays, you can probably do this stuff easily with D-Bus or whatever.)
One time, late at night, I was just listening to music in bed with headphones, controlling XMMS via infrared remote controller (LIRC). A random cool track came up. I had no idea what it was actually called. I went "wouldn't it be cool if I could hit a remote button and it'd say what song is currently playing?" ...so I got up, got back to the computer, and wrote a script that reads the pipe, takes the artist and song title, and feeds it to Festival TTS, then added that to LIRC configuration.