Part 2: Finding the current song playing in Android, still sorta.

I made a post about getting the filename from the mediaserver at the Tasker discussion group and others found that the lsof utility only comes on Cyanogen so many people don't have it. I found an alternative in "ls -l /proc/$(pidof mediaserver)/fd" and I'll show some ways to use it below.

Another poster, Matthieu, also figured out a way to get the mp3 tags from the files. The ID3v1 tags are pretty simple, but ID3v2 is a pain. Here is a post I made to that thread incorporating the lsof alternative, Matthieu's method of extracting ID3v1 from that thread, and the start of an ugly method to get ID3v2 tags. More on that in a moment.

Here's an lsof alternative. I think it could do without the grep command but it's safer with it in:

ls -l /proc/$(pidof mediaserver)/fd | sort -g -k 9 | grep mp3 | tail -n1

This will give you the long filename like /sdcard/foo.mp3:

ls -l /proc/$(pidof mediaserver)/fd | sort -g -k 9 | grep mp3 | tail -n1 | awk '{print substr($0, index($0,$11))}'

This gives the short filename like foo.mp3:

basename "$(ls -l /proc/$(pidof mediaserver)/fd | sort -g -k 9 | grep mp3 | tail -n1 | awk '{print substr($0, index($0,$11))}')" .mp3

This gives the id3v1 tag:

tail -c 125 $(ls -l /proc/$(pidof mediaserver)/fd  | sort -g -k 9 | grep mp3 | tail -n1 | awk '{print substr($0, index($0,$11))}') | head - c30

This gives the id3v2 tag but needs tweaking:

grep -A 20 TIT2 "$(ls -l /proc/$(pidof mediaserver)/fd  | sort -g -k 9 | grep mp3 | tail -n1 | awk '{print substr($0, index($0,$11))}')" | grep -m 1 [a-z]

That last one is ugly and unfinished. ID3v2 tags are variable length and the length of the tag is supposed to be encoded in the file itself but, for the life of me, I can't find a file on my system that follows that guideline. I'm obviously missing something because they display correctly when played, but most of them also have ID3v1 tags on the end as well, so maybe that's why they display properly.

I would spend time trying to find a better solution but Pent said he is going to add mp3 tag support to Tasker soon and that should work better than anything I could come up with. Plus, I'm really not interested in the tags. When something interests me, I usually get about an hour late at night to work on it, and I only want the file name.

As ugly as it is, the last one still kinda works. All the tags on my system start with TIT2, but are followed by a lot of hex gibberish before the plain text tag begins. This greps TIT2 then greps the first line below it that contains a lower case letter. On my files, it has a high success rate. One big problem it has is that the tag is often followed by another field such as TALB, so the output can be "Song TitleTALB." Someone could figure out all the possible fields in an ID3v2 tag then just use sed to chomp them off. Or someone cou otu a more reliable method, or we can just wait for Tasker to do it for us.