…getting Rainmeter to display the currently playing track from Songbird was a trip!

I just installed Rainmeter, which is great! It doesn’t support Songbird though… So I tried to get it to, but getting Rainmeter to display the currently playing track from Songbird was a trip! You see, Rainmeter only supports Winamp natively. So, I had to do some detective work and some modifying to get it to work. Here is how I did it…

First, I assume most of you have tried to figure this out yourself, or not! Anyway, you should have Rainmeter, Songbird, and the Songbird add-on LiveTweeter installed already. If not, do so. The Songbird add-on LiveTweeter can output a text file with the current track’s info, among other things. Exactly what we need!

Now, you have everything you need. Maybe, you jumped ahead or have already tried to write a Rainmeter .ini to display the text that LiveTweeter puts out. If you have or have not, here is what happens. Rainmeter will read the data from the text file just fine as long as something is playing in Songbird. Rainmeter crashes, though, whenever playback is paused or stopped in Songbird. This is because the LiveTweeter add-on empties the text file whenever playback is paused or stopped. Thus, Rainmeter tries to read an empty text file, which crashes it! So, I figured out how to prevent the file from being empty when playback is paused or stopped. I simply modified LiveTweeter’s output… its easy when you know how to do it! Let me show you how!

What you have to do is:

1. Close Songbird and Rainmeter
2. Open LiveTweeter.js in notepad (Its easiest to just search for the file because of the many different places it could be on different Operating Systems)
3. Search in the text for “var data = “”;” and change to “var data = ” “;” (Notice, I added a space.)
4. Save LiveTweeter.js
5. Write your own .ini or use my Rainmeter .ini file below.
6. Start up Rainmeter and Songbird
7. Try it out! No more crashes when a Songbird stops playing! (It’s that simple people!)

Explanation: By adding the space to the text file , it will always have data inside it. So, Rainmeter wont be reading an empty file and will no longer crash!

Enjoy!

Extras:
• Here is my Rainmeter .ini file for you. Use it and extend upon it.
• To install:
  1. Extract the .zip to your Rainmeter Skins folder
  2. Modify the text file path of SongbirdCurrentTrackInfo.ini to match your LiveTweeter output file
  3. remember to restart Rainmeter.

P.S. - This is a current issue with LiveTweeter, and will hopefully be changed in a future release. After all, it is just a simple change.