Dynamic Music Pill is a GNOME Shell extension that embeds a pill-shaped media controller into your desktop panel. It shows album art, artist name and track title alongside an animated waveform visualiser.
Unashamedly blingy, but there’s nothing wrong in that (right?).
The extension received an update today, which seem a good hook to actually take this off my “to write about” list. V20 adds a compact mode to hide all text; player filtering to add/ignore specific apps; and the option to set fallback album art for players/streams that don’t emit any.
Dynamic Music Pill works with any MPRIS-compatible media player. That will cover most of what you’re likely running, be it Spotify, Rhythmbox, VLC, a web app in your browser, etc. As GNOME Shell has its own media controller, this extension disables it when enabled.
You can see a quick demo of Dynamic Music Pill in the video below. While you can’t hear the actual music track change (copyright and all that), it gives you an idea of how this widget looks – with dynamic colouring enabled – and behaves in use:
Controls are straightforward: left-click the applet to toggle playback, right-click to access the full pop-up controller, and middle-click to bring the active player to the foreground. Those are configurable too, so if you’d rather left-click to see the pop-up, you can do that.
Indeed, most of what you see can be configured: background colour, transparency, whether to show player controls inside of the embed, set a fixed width for the pop up and applet, turn on album art rotation,
Although this little panel widget is designed for GNOME Shell, it plays nice with other extensions like Dash to Panel and Dash to Dock. In fact, I think it works best in those given there’s more height for the embed to nestle in – it even splits info onto a second line, neat!
Dynamic Music Pill is compatible with GNOME 45 – 49, so if you’re reading this on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or later you can try it out. Source code is up on GitHub.
One Ubuntu-specific quirk worth knowing: Dynamic Music Pill defaults to embedding itself in the Ubuntu Dock rather than the top panel, which doesn’t look right. Open the extension’s Preferences and go to the Style and Layout tab. Find the Position section and set ‘Container Target’ to ‘Panel’.
You can adjust where in the panel it appears (left, centre or right), and choose to fix an index (where it is located among other panel applets).
Install it from the GNOME Extensions website, but do play around with its settings to create a setup that suits. A handy ‘reset’ button makes it easy to undo any changes, should you want to start over.