iTunes Now Playing
I found this hint at MacOSXHints today. It’s pretty nifty, as it samples iTunes every 15 seconds, and if it detects that you are playing a new song, it generates a PNG and uploads it to your server. The image is then ready to use on your website, signatures, etc.
I dig it because it uses PNG, and because it’s themeable. Yes, there are other utilities that will extract this data as text for you, which can be nifty. As someone at MacOSXHints does, he runs the plain text through some PHP and pulls the album cover and a link to the album from Amazon.
However, doing it with a PNG means that characters won’t get screwed up if they are non-english, and more significantly, your song title won’t inadvertantly break your site if it has mark-up characters in it.
Posted Wednesday February 25, 2004 in Interesting by Derek Jones
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