Medialine

A GNOME Shell extension that shows the currently playing media track in the top bar in a elegant minimal way.

Preview

• Displays track info (title, artist, album) inline in the top bar
• Icon modes: album art, app icon, playback status icon, custom image, or none for a text-only label
• 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 media popup with:

• Album art preserving the original aspect ratio (square album covers and 16:9 video thumbnails like YouTube) — click to raise/focus the player window
• App icon badge overlaid on the album art, toggleable in settings
• 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 (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
• Customizable popup colors (primary text, secondary accent, and background)
• Dynamic background — optionally extract the dominant color from album art and use it as the popup background, with adjustable intensity to control brightness
• Music visualizer — optional animated bars next to the track info that react to playback (bars collapse to dots when paused)

When multiple media players are active, the popup switches to a compact list view showing each player with:

• Album art thumbnail (click to focus the player)
• Track title and artist/album
• Per-source play/pause and next-track controls
• Expandable rows — choose whether a compact row reveals full controls on hover, on click, or stays compact (off)

• Downloaded cover art (e.g. Spotify) is cached on disk to avoid re-fetching
• Configurable cache size limit; least-recently-used art is evicted when the limit is hit

Each mouse button (left, middle, right) and scroll direction (up, down) can be independently configured to:

• Do nothing
• Open the popup
• Play / Pause
• Open extension settings
• Skip to next track / previous track
• Raise the player window
• Volume up / Volume down (scroll only, via Gvc mixer)

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

• Optionally suppress GNOME's built-in media notification while the panel indicator is shown

• 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

• Block specific media sources so only real players show up in the panel and popup
• The Media sources list (Behaviour page) shows every running player with a toggle — turn one off to block it
• Ideal for silencing browser-tab autoplay (YouTube previews, etc.): block your browser and only proper media players remain
• Blocked sources are ignored entirely and persist across restarts; unblocking makes them reappear instantly

• Optional advanced detection to match the active PWA window and show the correct app icon for web apps (YouTube Music, etc.)

• GNOME Shell 45 – 50
• An MPRIS-compatible media player (Spotify, VLC, Firefox, Rhythmbox, mpv, etc.)

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

Preferences are split across three pages: Top Bar, Popup, and Behaviour.

Panel placement

Icon

Label

Colors

Display

Click actions — assign an action to left, middle, and right click (Nothing, Open popup, Play/Pause, Open settings, Next track, Previous track, Raise player).

Scroll actions — assign an action to scroll up and scroll down (same as click, plus Volume up / Volume down).

MIT — see LICENSE.