Now Playing… now playing!
Most members of the vast community of three individuals that read this blog are rock-and-rollers with one foot in their grave, just like me.
That’s why, for extra action, I’m sure they’ve been rawking out over the last 24 hours via a deeper understanding of what’s playing in my iTunes at any given time:
You can go check out this guy’s page, as he wrote the iTunes now playing visualizer plug-in that dumps the song metadata as XML and automatically ftp’s it to my web server, where some PHP handles the presentation (such as it is).
For $10… I wish I could say it was an interstellar value, considering I’m a php/xml n00b, but it’s rocking out, has only crashed once in the last 72 hours, and lets the world stop and melt with my awesome taste in music. Looking forward to updates…
Looking at the bright side, I know 1,000-10,000% more about PHP, XML and editing Wordpress templates than I did before this exercise (considering I knew practically nothing… you can tell i’ve learned a lot. And these are good things and probably worth the $10 alone.
Ancillary Benefit: I’m an iTunes metadata freak, and the current obsession is getting album art inserted with a relatively high hit rate in my 35K+ song library. Now Playing has an extremely high hit rate for pulling down album art from Amazon when you have good song/album metadata in the file. At which point I just look at my page, click on the album art, and I’m automatically at Amazon where I can pull down a high-res version of the image (usually).
After that, an option-click on the album link brings up just the entire album… apple-A, insert album artwork. Could be a cleaner/fresher process, but it beats having to actually go to Amazon and look for the stuff.
rds
May 7th, 2006 at 5:01 pm
Due to recent versions of Now Playing crashing iTunes with extreme prejudice, as well as long gaps between updates, I’ve ejected it in favor of last.fm, which is currently in shakedown status.
Clean.
rds