From macosxhints

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:
It doesn't hang iTunes when a server is broken. (eg. when Listen-To.com is bogged down)
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.
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!


Kung Tunes

Authored by: robmck on Wed, Feb 25 '04 at 10:45AM

Also see Kung Tunes, which I've used to do the same thing, although it just produces HTML (or javascript, or whatever you want,) and not an image (as far as I know; it's been a few months since I looked at it.) Automatically uploads your formatted file every X minutes, or every time you change tracks, or whatever. You can list as many previous tracks as you want, formatted however you like.


Use 'Now Playing' to create graphical iTunes web tags

Authored by: ubik on Wed, Feb 25 '04 at 10:55AM

Hehehe: Uchu no Stellvia! Good anime, good song! ^_^

[ Reply to This ]


Use 'Now Playing' to create graphical iTunes web tags

Authored by: seven5 on Wed, Feb 25 '04 at 11:21AM

Also check out Recent Tunes: http://www.freshlysqueezedsoftware.com/products/freeware/

I prefer Recent Tunes over kung tunes for a lot of reasons. I got sick of kung tunes being an actual app with a gui, and being in my dock. This is something that really needs to just be a background process. Also, kung tunes uses applescript and is dog slow. And recently it has seemed to get even slower at creating the file to upload. I was begging for a new app and Freshly Squeezed Software filled the request...

Check it out. i love it.

[ Reply to This ]


Use 'Now Playing' to create graphical iTunes web tags

Authored by: seven5 on Wed, Feb 25 '04 at 11:23AM

Also, the nice thing about using text files over images is that you get to throw some php in there. Check out my music section on my right side bar at: http://www.jonsthoughtsoneverything.com

I use php to create variables for my current song and then use the Amazon web services to find and display the album art.