7.1. General

The General tab itself is further divided into tabs, which are explained below.

7.1.1. Main Window

The options controlling the behavior of the Main Window speak for themselves. One advantage of combining the Play and Pause buttons is that it allows for starting playback and later toggling between play and pause with the same remote command, `aqualung -N0 --play'. It is useful if your keyboard has a combined Play/Pause multimedia button and you want to utilize its functionality to control Aqualung via remote commands.

7.1.2. Title Format

The Title format string will be used to construct a single title line from an Artist, a Record and a Track name when adding songs to the Playlist. The Artist, Record and Track names should appear as `%a', `%r' and `%t' flags in the template, respectively.

Conditional string elements can be inserted using a `?A1|A2|...|An{CONTENT}' expression, where each Ai should be a subset of the available flag characters (that is, the set {a,r,t}). The value of the conditional expression is the logical OR of the individual Ai expressions. The value of an Ai expression is true if all strings are available whose flag character appears in the expression in question (logical AND).

If the conditional is true, the content of the following pair of braces will be inserted, otherwise it will be skipped. The CONTENT string may contain the flags `%a', `%r' or `%t' as well.

If you want to insert a literal `%', `?' or `}' you should write `%%', `%?' or `%}', respectively, except for a `?' inside CONTENT, and a `}' outside CONTENT, where they can appear unquoted. Of course it is good practice to always escape these characters for the sake of clarity if one needs them literally.

Everything that is neither a conditional expression nor a flag will be copied verbatim into the result.

Note that the expression `?a{%a}' is equivalent to `%a' since the flags will only be substituted if the corresponding string is available, so there's no need for the extra check.

An example title format is `%a?ar|at{ - }%r?rt{ - }%t'. Using this format string, one would get the following components, in order:

7.1.3. Lua extension file

This section is only available if Aqualung is compiled with Lua extension support. If so, it specifies the file to use for the extension support See the Extending Aqualung section for details about what's possible to include in this file.

7.1.4. Systray

This page is present only if Aqualung was compiled with systray support. Even if it is supported, it can be turned off here, which naturally makes further configuration useless. If systray is enabled, Aqualung can start in minimized state – a useful feature if the program is launched automatically from the startup script of the window manager.

Mouse button and wheel events on the tray icon are supported and can be assigned configurable commands. You can assign separate commands to the vertical and horizontal mouse wheels. Choose the desired command from the list displayed by the corresponding combo box.

The left and right mouse buttons are reserved for hiding/showing the windows and popping up the context menu, respectively. Any other buttons can be bound to a custom command by adding a new button to the list. In the presented dialog, move the cursor over the test panel and press the button you want to configure. Below the test panel, choose the appropriate action to be taken when you click on the tray icon with the selected mouse button. One button can be assigned only one command at a time. To change an already configured button, remove it from the list first and add it again.

7.1.5. Miscellaneous

The so-called Implicit command line is something you should pay attention to. It exists mainly for those who have a stable sound setup and always use the program with the same output device, e.g. they have only OSS and don't plan to upgrade. For such users it may be cumbersome to always specify the desired output device on the command line, along with its optional parameters if needed. So here you may enter something that you would otherwise enter on the command line every time.

But beware: you cannot override or turn off every option, so for example if you enter `--help' here, the program will always display the standard message and exit immediately; and there is no way to override that from the command line. If you get into trouble, all you have to (or can) do is grab a text editor and hack it out of $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/aqualung/config.xml where it is stored (note that $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is most likely ~/.config). You will find it between `<default_param>' and `</default_param>'.

There are also some options to handle the display of album cover art. This feature is automatically triggered when an image file is found in the same directory as the track being played. The filenames that will at first be looked for are `cover.ext', `.cover.ext', `front.ext', `.front.ext', `folder.ext', `.folder.ext', where `ext' is one of `jpg', `jpeg', `png', `gif', `bmp', `tif', `tiff'. If none of them exists, the first image file having an appropriate extension will be used. If you select a record (or one of its tracks) in the Music Store, the image will be displayed in the comment pane. It is also shown in the File Info dialog as well as the main window during the playback of a track from this album. Clicking the image will show a zoomed version of the cover.

When playing files or viewing them in the File info dialog, embedded pictures are also used for cover display. If an embedded picture frame is found in file metadata, it is displayed instead of any separate image file. If there is more than one embedded picture in the file, the first one is used. In these cases no separate image file is used, so the embedded image found in file metadata is displayed regardless of any separate image in the audio file's directory.

There are some global options to set here as well, which should be quite obvious to use.