PlasMusic Toolbar

PlasMusic Toolbar is a KDE Plasma widget that shows current playback information and provides playback controls. This fork contains additional Full View media and synced-lyrics features maintained independently from upstream.

🧩 Compatibility

• Compatible with KDE Plasma 6.0.4 and newer.
• Last compatible release for older Plasma 6 versions: v3.7.0
• Plasma 5: a Plasma 5 version of the widget is available in the plasma5 branch: https://github.com/ccatterina/plasmusic-toolbar/tree/plasma5

✨ Features

• 🎵 Now Playing — Title, artist and album art shown right in the KDE panel.
• ⏯️ Playback Controls — Play, pause, skip and go back without leaving the panel.
• 📸 Full View — Popup with album art, full playback controls (shuffle, repeat included), volume and seek bar.
• 🎼 Synced Mini-Lyrics — Optional LRCLIB-backed lyrics with clickable timestamp seeking, horizontal overflow scrolling, configurable intermission markers, and experimental glow animation.
• 🔤 Lyrics Romanization — Korean, Japanese and Chinese lyrics transliterated to the latin alphabet, in place of the original line.
• 🖼️ Combined Media View — Configure album art and mini-lyrics together, including their order, position above or below playback controls, spacing, padding, and album-art visibility.
• 🔀 Preferred Source — Choose which media player the widget should follow.
• 🖥️ Flexible Layout — Works in horizontal and vertical panels, and as a desktop widget.
• 🎨 Deep Customization — Album-art-derived slider colors, fonts, panel visibility, scrolling behavior, playback-section layout, keep-open behavior, and more.

All media info (title, artist, cover art url, playback state) is read from your media player via MPRIS2. The same interface is used to send playback and other commands back to the player.

Synced lyrics

Mini-lyrics are disabled by default and can be enabled in Full View → Media → Show mini-lyrics. When enabled, the widget queries LRCLIB for synced lyrics using the current track metadata.

• Click a lyric line to seek to its timestamp when the player supports seeking.
• Long lyric lines can scroll horizontally while the active line is displayed.
• Large timing gaps can be shown as a ♪ intermission row. The gap threshold is configurable in seconds and defaults to 8 seconds.
• The experimental animation selector currently provides None and Glow sweep.
• Lyrics are unavailable when LRCLIB has no matching synced lyrics or network access is unavailable.

Romanization

CJK lyrics can be transliterated to the latin alphabet, configured separately for the panel (Panel View → Romanize Korean, Japanese and Chinese) and the popup (Full View → Romanize Korean, Japanese and Chinese). Romanization replaces the original line. Everything runs offline, from tables shipped with the widget.

The script is detected once per song, from all of its lines together, since a single line of Japanese is often indistinguishable from Chinese.

• Korean uses Revised Romanization, including the sound changes across syllable boundaries: 독립문 becomes dongnimmun, not doklipmun.
• Chinese uses Hanyu Pinyin with tone marks. Polyphonic characters are resolved through a word list, so 长大 is zhǎng dà while 长发 is cháng fà. Syllables are separated individually, as word boundaries cannot be recovered from the text.
• Japanese uses Hepburn for kana plus offline UniDic/JMdict word readings for common kanji and inflected forms — 君の名は becomes kimi no na wa. Unknown kanji are left in place rather than guessed, since readings depend on the surrounding word.

📦 Installation

One-liner

Installs (or upgrades) the widget and optionally restarts PlasmaShell:

bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jojo-chaechae/plasmusic-toolbar/main/install.sh)

To install from a specific branch:

PLASMUSIC_BRANCH=v0.2.0 bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jojo-chaechae/plasmusic-toolbar/main/install.sh)

GitHub release

Download the .plasmoid file from this fork's releases, then install it with kpackagetool6 --type Plasma/Applet --install <file>.plasmoid. For an existing installation, use --upgrade instead of --install. Restart PlasmaShell or log out and back in to load the update.

KDE store

The KDE Store listing is for the upstream project and does not include this fork's additional features:

• https://store.kde.org/p/2128143

Manual

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/jojo-chaechae/plasmusic-toolbar.git /tmp/plasmusic-toolbar

2. Install the widget:

   kpackagetool6 -i /tmp/plasmusic-toolbar/src/ --type Plasma/Applet

3. Upgrading the widget:

   kpackagetool6 -u /tmp/plasmusic-toolbar/src/ --type Plasma/Applet

4. Restart PlasmaShell after installation or an upgrade:

   plasmashell --replace

5. Removing the widget:

   kpackagetool6 -r plasmusic-toolbar-fork --type Plasma/Applet

🌍 Translations

Want to help translate PlasMusic Toolbar into your language? See TRANSLATIONS.md for instructions.

🖼️ Screenshots

Screenshots for the fork's Full View media and mini-lyrics features are still needed. Tracked in issue #9.