In this post, I’ll focus on the application in the top-right: Sonata.  Sonata, through a strange series of relationships, hooks up with my music library.  To be technical, it is a gui interface to the music player daemon (mpd), which in turn scans my /mnt/windows/Music directory each day for new music (with a handy /etc/cron.daily entry).

Sonata is set apart from the cli interface offered by my favourite mpd client, ncmpc, by its ability to popup with the current song (via libnotify and the notification-daemon), download album covers from Amazon, tag my music (although I use easytag for this), scrobble played tracks to last.fm (mpd can do this through a plugin, however) and display the lyrics for the song.  Plus, sometimes it’s nice to have a clickable interface. Also, in the event that the entire X server (the program that gives me a gui) goes down, mpd will still be playing my music :).

Some pictures:

Album Covers

Player Window

Track Info

Compact Mode