Spotify D-Bus notification Enhancer

Goofy program to enhance the useless notifications sent by Spotify on Linux.

Dependencies

Building manually

This program is written in the Vala language, which makes interface with DBus much easier. This project uses Meson to compile the program.

To be able to compile, you need the dependencies listed in the meson.build file, namely:

• glib-2.0 (base Vala requirement)
• gobject-2.0 (base Vala requirement)
• gio-2.0 (DBus interfacing)

Then prepare the meson project:

meson setup build

Tip

Use the --buildtype=release to build in release mode

Then compile:

meson compile -C build

Nix / NixOS

This repo uses Nix flakes and has compatibility for non-flakes systems and exposes the script as a package as well as a systemd user service via an Home Manager module.

Flakes

Add this repo to your flake inputs and either add import the module or add the program to your packages.

_flake.nix

{
  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-23.11";
    home-manager.url = "github:nix-community/home-manager/release-23.11";

    spotify-notifyx = {
      url = "github:ItsShamed/spotify-dbus-enhancer/master";
      inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
    };
  };

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, home-manager, spotify-notifyx, ... } @ inputs:
  {
    homeConfigurations.user = home-manager.lib.homeManagerConfiguration {
      pkgs = import nixpkgs {
        system = "x86_64-linux"; # or aarch64-linux
      };

      extraSpecialArgs = { inherit inputs; };

      modules = [
        # Add the module or...
        spotify-notifyx.homeManagerModules.default
      ];
    };
  };
}

_home.nix

{ pkgs, inputs, ... }:

{
  # ... install the package
  home.packages = [
    inputs.spotify-notifyx.defaultPackage.${pkgs.system}
  ];
  # ...
}

Without Flakes

{ pkgs, ... }:

let
  spotify-notifix = import (builtins.fetchTarball "https://github.com/ItsShamed/spotify-dbus-enhancer/archive/master.tar.gz");
in
{
  # Import module
  imports = [
    spotify-notifix.homeManagerModules.default
  ];

  # Or add package
  home.packages = [
    spotify-notifix.defaultPackage.${pkgs.system}
  ];
}

How does it works?

The programs listens on a D-Bus Session Bus for method calls to org.freedesktop.Notifications.Notify, and only matches notifications which have the appname "Spotify".

Once a notification is matched, the program will check on Spotify's MPris instance to get all necessary metadata. It will then edit the matched notification with better formatting, and resend the call with the same replaces_id parameter, which will flawlessly replace the notification.

History

This used to be a simple Python script that used the dbus-python and PyGObject librairies. But at that time I didn't knew much about how D-Bus worked and juste copy-pasted code from the Internet.

On top of that due to how poor it was written (and beacause it's Python), the filter would take too long to process and resend the notification to the point where you would actually see the notification being edited live.

Since 27c1443c, this has been rewritten in Vala, because it's a GLib and D-Bus oriented language that fits much more for this purpose.

License

This software is licensed under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file to learn more.