Extract song info from iTunes

You may or may not have noticed that the song listing on the left is pretty dynamic and recently has included the album cover for the most recently played song.

I used to do this all manually with an applescript with a bit of shell that I’d hacked together, running every 10 seconds in a hidden geektool panel. My script was very very ugly. I uploaded 2008 lines of text that already existed on the other side because it was easier for my ignorant non-programmer skills to produce and broadband with compression can upload a 600K file quick enough to make it not matter. But I knew how lame that was.

I’ve just finished upgrading to a third party Wordpress plugin, cg-whattunes, which fetches amazon art, accepts the currently playing track and caches it. The nice part is that it caches the history locally for me so I only need to HTTP POST songs using curl as they change.

iTunes still lacks the ability to trigger events on track changing, so I’m still forced to use a good bit of my old script, modified to work specifically with cg-whattunes every 10 seconds in a hidden geektool panel.

Still a nasty ugly kludge, but hay look, album art. Note: If you use cg-whattunes out of the box it won’t look like mine on the sidebar, I hacked the output a bit. ;)