Newgrounds Radio for Omarchy

Listen to Newgrounds Radio straight from the Omarchy bar — realtime now-playing info, album art, listener stats, and a play history, pushed the moment they change.

The official Newgrounds Radio client for Omarchy, from the team that runs the station.

• Compact orange NG + play/pause pill in the bar
• Popup panel with album art, track / artist / genre, live listener count, on-air time, and skip votes
• Recently-played list — each track row links to the track on Newgrounds
• Album art and title link to the track page; the artist links to their Newgrounds user page (when the artist is a single username)
• Desktop notification on track change while you're listening, with cover art — click it to open the track on Newgrounds
• Opus / MP3 stream picker in the popup — switching mid-song reconnects on the spot
• Realtime updates over the station's socket.io feed (a tiny Engine.IO v4 long-polling client built on curl), with automatic reconnect
• One shared mpv stream and one feed connection, no matter how many monitors your bar spans

Install

Requires mpv and curl, both included with Omarchy:

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/brenc/omarchy-newgrounds-radio.git --enable

Then add the Newgrounds Radio widget to your bar from omarchy-shell bar settings, or run omarchy restart shell if it does not appear.

Uninstall

omarchy plugin remove brenc.newgrounds-radio

That removes the plugin and its bar widget. Besides the current track's cover art (one cached image in the shell's cache directory, under newgrounds-radio/), the plugin never writes outside its own entry in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json; if you added an optional trackNotifications or codec override there (see Usage), remove that entry by hand. Versions up to 1.2.0 needed qt6-websockets; if you installed it only for this plugin, omarchy pkg drop qt6-websockets removes it.

Usage

Track-change notifications only fire while the stream is playing. To turn them off, add "trackNotifications": false to the widget's entry in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json:

{ "id": "brenc.newgrounds-radio", "trackNotifications": false }

The stream plays as Opus by default. To start on MP3 instead, set "codec": "mp3" in the same entry. The popup picker switches for the current session; the setting decides what the shell starts with.

How it works

• Service.qml (a singleton shell service) owns the mpv process for the station stream (radio.opus or radio.mp3 on https://stream.newgroundsradio.com) and a connection to the station's socket.io endpoint, which pushes a full status — current track, listeners, skip votes, play log — on connect and on every change. The feed uses Engine.IO long-polling: each request is a curl the server holds open until it has news, and curl caps the size of every response before the shell sees it. Playback auto-reconnects if the stream drops; the feed reconnects with a watchdog for silent connection deaths (suspend/resume, network drops).
• BarWidget.qml renders the bar pill and popup on each monitor, all reading the one shared service.

The stream is already loudness-normalized by the station, so the plugin plays it as-is.

Troubleshooting

If the widget doesn't appear in the bar at all, add it from the bar settings or run omarchy restart shell.

If the popup never shows a track, the feed can't reach the station. Check that this prints a line starting with 0{"sid":

curl -sS 'https://api.newgroundsradio.com/socket.io/?EIO=4&transport=polling'

Development

Git hooks live in .githooks and are committed with the repo. Git does not enable a custom hooks path automatically, so run this once per clone:

git config core.hooksPath .githooks

pre-commit then runs ./check — qmllint plus the RadioLogic test suite — and blocks the commit on a real finding. If the linter isn't installed the hook skips rather than fails.

./check is also the way to run things by hand. The pure feed-handling logic lives in RadioLogic.js so it can be tested without the shell: Quickshell's QML modules are compiled into the quickshell binary, so qmltestrunner cannot load anything that imports them.

License

This plugin is MIT licensed.

External dependencies

Nothing is vendored or bundled — the plugin only invokes software you install separately, and streams from Newgrounds' own servers:

Audio, artwork, and track metadata are served by Newgrounds Radio and remain the property of Newgrounds and the respective artists.