Medialine

A GNOME Shell extension that shows the currently playing media track in the top bar via MPRIS.

• Displays track info (title, artist, album) inline in the top bar
• Three icon modes: album art, app icon, or playback status icon
• Auto-hides when no media is playing or playback is stopped
• Configurable icon size, spacing, text separator, and max label width

Click the indicator to open a rich media popup with:

• Album art preserving the original aspect ratio (works for square album covers and 16:9 video thumbnails like YouTube) — falls back to a generic icon if unavailable
• Track title, artist, and album name
• Live progress bar with elapsed and total time (updates every second)
• Click or drag anywhere on the progress bar to seek to that position (a thumb appears on hover when the player supports seeking)
• Playback controls — shuffle, previous, play/pause, next, repeat (off / track / playlist) — with greyed-out state when unavailable

Each mouse button (left, middle, right) can be independently configured to:

• Do nothing
• Open the popup
• Play / Pause
• Open extension settings
• Skip to next track
• Skip to previous track
• Volume up / Volume down (via pactl)

• Place the indicator in the left, center, or right section of the top bar
• Set a position index to control ordering within that section

• Automatically detects all running MPRIS-compatible media players
• Prefers actively Playing sources; falls back to Paused ones
• Reacts instantly when players start, stop, or change tracks

• GNOME Shell 45 – 50
• An MPRIS-compatible media player (Spotify, VLC, Firefox, Rhythmbox, mpv, etc.)
• pactl (PipeWire/PulseAudio) — only required if using volume up/down click actions

Install directly from extensions.gnome.org/medialine.

Download the latest medialine@funinkina.co.in.zip from the Releases page, then install it:

gnome-extensions install --force medialine@funinkina.co.in.zip
gnome-extensions enable medialine@funinkina.co.in

Log out and back in (or restart GNOME Shell on X11 with Alt+F2 → r) for the extension to appear.

git clone https://github.com/funinkina/medialine
cd medialine
make install
make enable

Then log out and back in (or restart GNOME Shell on X11 with Alt+F2 → r).

Open the extension preferences via:

• GNOME Extensions app
• Right-clicking the indicator → Settings
• Configuring a mouse button to Open settings and clicking

Assign an action to left, middle, and right click individually.

MIT — see LICENSE.