Pidgin is one of the best free-open source clients for instant messaging (simply chatting). Besides you can extend its features with the use of plugins. So lets get down to the main topic.. Most of you might have experienced the “Now Playing” plugin in WLM which basically displays the currently playing song in your personal message. But unfortunately Pidgin lacks in this feature. So as I wanted this thing very badly I’v googled.. and voila..!! I’v found a plugin called MusicTracker which is pretty easy to use and the best is it supports many famous media players like iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp & Foobar 2000. The only drawback is it shows song information along with your display name.
Configuring MusicTracker
Once you install it, open Pidgin and select plugins by clicking on the tools menu. Afterwards enable MusicTracker and click Configure. So you will be able to configure the plugin as necessary. By the way, I would like to recommend these settings for easy configuration.
Player: Auto-detect
Playing: | %p – %t
Paused: | %p – %t <paused>
So it will be like yourname | artist – song
One thing to point out though, that the use of %m switch won’t work perfectly since the symbol is a Unicode character and some of the IM clients don’t support Unicode in their text boxes. And make sure that you leave the “Stopped/off:” text box blank.
Download Links
Pidgin messenger – http://www.pidgin.im
MusicTracker – http://code.google.com/p/musictracker/
Happy tweaking..
this is awsome.. neva thought this is possible.. thanx..
this is kewl…!! hav to check it out.. =)