MMM-NowPlayingOnVolumio — a fresh "now playing" module for Volumio

rkorell

Good evening!

After a lot of on-and-off wrestling with Spotify on my mirror, I finally sat down and built something new — and I’m genuinely happy with how it turned out: MMM-NowPlayingOnVolumio.

The backstory (some of you will feel this pain 🙂)

I’ve run Spotify through librespot for long time now, and it kept breaking in ever-new and creative ways. The latest one — the login5 change — finally finished it off for me: hard to fix, only community support and no chances that things will become better.
So I decided finally to jump ship to Tidal.

That meant my beloved (forked) MMM-NowPlayingOnSpotify was suddenly out of a job — Tidal doesn’t expose a “currently playing” API the way Spotify does. The existing Volumio modules would have been the obvious fallback… but they’re pretty old (8 and 9 years) and simply too old for a current Trixie / Node 22 setup (ancient socket.io and friends). So: a new module, written from scratch against current Volumio (4.x) and current Node.

The silver lining

Moving to Tidal pushed me onto Volumio’s Premium tier — and that turned unexpectedly even into a
real win. (I’m not THAT big fan of “payment-plans” at all - but: I get noticeably better sound quality (Spotify via Volumio is quality-limited by intent), and (that’s the surprise) the Premium plan unlocks Volumio’s Music Metadata, so the module can show a proper artist biography right on the mirror. More info and better sound — I’ll happily take that trade.

What it does

Shows what Volumio is playing — cover, title, artist, progress bar and
elapsed/total time.
Optional artist biography from Volumio’s Music Metadata (Premium), Between Artists’s Name and progreess bar - shown page by page with a gentle cross-fade — no jittery scrolling.- Because Volumio is the source of truth, it works with any source: Tidal, Spotify, Qobuz, web radio, local files — no changes when you switch services.
When nothing is playing it quietly fades to the Volumio logo.
Clean split: the backend holds a persistent socket.io connection and does the work, the frontend just displays. It reconnects on its own and survives browser reloads.

Config

Basically just your Volumio host:
(some options more available - see documentaion on github)

{
  module: "MMM-NowPlayingOnVolumio",
  position: "bottom_left",
  // header: "Volumio",
  config: {
    volumioHost: "volumio.local",
    showArtistBio: true
  }
}

One dev note for the curious: current Volumio runs a socket.io 2.x server, so socket.io-client is pinned to exactly 2.4.0 — 2.5.0 and the 4.x line won’t connect. That one cost a moment to figure out. 🙂

GitHub (MIT): https://github.com/rkorell/MMM-NowPlayingOnVolumio

Feedback, issues and PRs are very welcome — especially from fellow Volumionists.

Happy mirroring!

Warmest regards,
Ralf

(module is included in 3rd-party-module-list)