iPod and iTunes Hacks

Upload a Graphic of Your Currently Playing Song

With Now Playing, you can upload to your web site a .png file that shows which track you are currently listening to in iTunes.

Blogs are great. Blogs that have graphics that update automatically to show which song you are listening to are even better! With this hack you will be able to post a graphic (automatically updated every 15 seconds) that will show the song you are currently playing in iTunes. You can use any number of template graphics or design your own.

This hack uses a program called Now Playing (http://www.big.or.jp/~crane/soft/nowPlaying/; free). Yes, that is .jp; most of the site is in Japanese, and there is only one help file in English. Don’t worry, though; Now Playing spits out titles in English, and if you read this hack closely, you’ll have all the knowledge you need to get the most out of the application.

Now Playing has a one-window interface with four tabs: Theme, Network, Filter, and Etc (shown in Figure 4-41).

Figure 4-41. Now Playing’s interface

The Theme panel is where you select the look of your graphic. You can select any of the more than 10 available themes. A preview loads in the window below. Within any particular theme, you can adjust the display font used by clicking on the Define button. Select any font you ...