As you might have already discovered conky is great. I have done many configs with it but lately I have arrived to a simple but yet functional config which I am going to present in this post. To avoid problems and typos which might occur when copy/paste is done to WordPress I have attached my config to a pdf file which you will find at the end of this post.

Needed programs to get the conky config running:

conky (obviously), exaile music player and alsa-base and alsa-utils.

Exaile is a music player and alsa-base and alsa-utils make sure that the information about the volume levels gets to conky as it should. In most cases alsa-utils and alsa-base are already installed but you should make sure that this is the case.

There is also a commented out feature in the config to use audacious instead of exaile. Note that the audacious parts are a leftovers from my old config. At this point audacious does not run well in my system so the current status of audacious conky parts is uncertain even though  there is a strong reason to presume that they do work like they are supposed to.

Conky running while playing music with exaile.

And last but not least here is a conky config file as a pdf: unified2

Copy the content and safe it as a regular text file to a location of your choosing. I used/entered the following pathway inside my .fluxbox/startup file: conky -c .unified2 &

You can of course use the default conky config file path if you like and safe the file as .conkyrc . This way the config is running every time you invoke the conky just by starting the program with conky command.

Note: if you get any weird graphical errors try to turn the option double_buffer off as it might possibly solve the issues.

Edit: and by turning double_buffer off I mean this entry: double_buffer no. So you need to change the word yes to no.

Have fun with conky!