Use 'Now Playing' to create graphical iTunes web tags

Feb 25, '04 10:11:00AM

Contributed by: KRC

I finally found an OS X program called nowPlaying that will allow me to export the song title and artist of a particular song into an image file AND automatically upload it to an FTP server (or .Mac account or a WebDAV server). The file could then could be used as a dynamic image for a message board or Blog. The website is in Japanese, but if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you'll find the download link [376KB] for v1.2. Don't worry -- the program is in English.

Some of the nicer things with this, as opposed to signing up to a Listen-To.com account are that:

  1. It doesn't hang iTunes when a server is broken. (eg. when Listen-To.com is bogged down)
  2. It displays the song titles in Unicode, meaning that if your songs have Japanese, Chinese, Korean, or just have non-English characters (Klingon maybe?), then the PNG file will be displayed with those appropriate characters. Listen-To.com will just display the title as "Unknown" or something like "[][][][]~engrish text~" which each box represents a non-English character.
  3. You can customize the PNG templates without paying anyone as opposed to Listen-to.com's yearly fee. (The How-To doc is in Japanese but all you need to do is make a PNG file and create your own .plist file based on the How-To doc and that should be it!)
This might be useful for someone wanting to show what's playing in iTunes as an image signature for messageboards and stuff. Here is an example of an output PNG file using the Sky Blue theme ... hope you find it useful!

[robg adds: This is a slick little program; you can even easily change the fonts used in the pre-defined styles. I'm not sure I need to tell the world how odd my listening habits are, but this would be a very easy way to do so if I did!]

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Mac OS X Hints
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