Many Fedora users listen to music through their laptops and desktops. In fact Fedora offers a wide range of media players, such as Rhythmbox, Banshee, and GNOME Music. Some of these players, like GNOME Music, provide notifications that appear when a track changes, but these notifications are easy to miss, and they don’t provide any control over the playing music.

This is where the Media Player Indicator extension (which can be installed directly via the GNOME Extenstions website) can be an excellent addition if you listen to music on your Fedora Workstation. By default, the Media Player Indicator extension places an additional widget in the system status menu. This widget adds Artist, Trackname, and Album information, as well as Album artwork, and controls for stopping, starting, and skipping tracks.

More Media Player Indicator options

The Media player indicator also provides options for customizing how the information about your music is displayed. There is the option to move the indicator out of the System Status area, to its own item on the topbar (with two locations supported; right, and center near the clock).

You can also configure the track name and artist to show in the topbar as well, providing a convenient place to glance at on your desktop to see what track is playing. There is also an option to replace the symbolic icon in the topbar with a tiny version of the album artwork as well.

All these options and more can be tweaked in the extensions settings in the GNOME Tweak Tool (In the Extensions tab).

Supported Media Players

The Media Player Indicator extension is built on the Media Player Remote Interfacing Specification (MPRIS), so most of the features of the extension will work if your media player or streaming player supports MPRIS. Many media players in and available on Fedora Workstation either support MPRIS out-of-the-box, or have plugins that add support for MPRIS, including: Amarok, Audacious (via a plugin), Banshee (via a plugin), Clementine, Dragon Player, Exaile (via a plugin), GNOME Music, Guayadeque, JuK, Nuvola, Pragha (MPRIS needs to be enabled in settings), Rhythmbox (via a plugin), Spotify Player, and Totem (via a plugin).