The macosxhints Rating:
[Score: 9 out of 10]
- Developer: Freshly Squeezed Software / [Product Page]
- Price: Free
After some hunting, I found Recent Tunes. Recent Tunes places a small icon in your menubar, through which you control the program. When you click the icon, you'll see the "Now Playing" song, and a list of the recently played songs. This is a nice touch, as it provides an easy way to jump back to a recently-played favorite song you might want to hear again. The preferences allow you to change the number of songs displayed, the color and style of icon, and whether or not to display album and artist info in the menu. There are four other tabs in prefs -- CurrentTune and RecentTunes control the files that list your current and recently played songs -- where to save them, whether to upload them to a server, and (for recent tunes), how many songs to list. The Upload tab gives you four upload options (FTP, SSH1, SSH2, and HTTP Get).
Finally, the Templates tab is the part I found most useful -- here you specify exactly which fields you'd like uploaded, and how you want them formatted. You can include variables (^t, for instance, is song title) as well as text and even HTML. So my Current Tune template looks like this:
<li>^t by ^p</li>
This is so that it can go right into the WordPress sidebar area I've set up for it, where the unordered list is already defined. I then just include the uploaded text file in the right section of the WordPress index.php file, like this:
<li><b>Now Playing:</b>
<ul>
<?php include('currenttune.html'); ?>
</ul>
</li>
Presto! Instant sidebar entry with song information (a similar layout is used for the recent tunes). I realize this may be a bit more complex than needed for many folks, but I like the flexibility of many different upload options, and fully customizable templates. There's even an "Away" message to display when iTunes isn't playing. It's hard to beat the price, too!

