Terminal Tip: "Now Playing" info from the command line

I've got a much easier way of finding out what song is playing on iTunes -- Try listening to it.

Now. Is there a way to make it so a hotkey will paste that info into the current application?

Erica, you rock so hard. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I stand corrected. This is the greatest thing since the Lisa. ;) Sorry, my geek sensibilities left me for a while there.

I have many songs that have unicode characters (japanese), and they do now show properly when using this. how do i enable it?

OK, the HTML was only a partial success. The formatting of the source code was messed up an the URLs for GeekTool:

http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/

and my writeup

http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2006/07/off_track.html

were lost. Now I know to go text-only at TUAW.

I’m going to cross my fingers that TUAW comments will accept HTML…

As Sovok said in comment #6, this sort of utility works very well when invoked by GeekTool. One problem with using it from GeekTool is that if iTunes isn’t running, this script will start it—probably not what you want.

The way to avoid this is to first check whether iTunes is running using the ‘ps’ command. Last year I wrote a pair of scripts (one AppleScript, one shell) that work together to do this checking and print the appropriate info. The output is either


“iTunes off,”
“Not playing,” or
the track name, artist, and album


depending on what’s going on. The AppleScript (~/bin/itunes-playing.scpt) is

set notify to "Not playing"
tell application "iTunes"
if player state is playing then
set who to artist of current track as string
set what to name of current track as string
set onwhat to album of current track as string
set notify to """ & what & "" by " & who & " from " & onwhat
end if
end tell
notify


The shell script (~/bin/playing) is

#!/bin/bash
if [[ -n `ps x | grep "iTunes -psn" | grep -v grep` ]]; then
osascript ~/bin/itunes-playing.scpt
else
echo "iTunes off"
fi


I wrote a more complete description, including the GeekTool setup, here.

I use something similar with GeekTool, I run a rather minimalistic desktop relying souly on GeekTool and Quicksilver for input and output of data. Here's a screenshot of my current setup:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smesser/437188260/

Also, put any of these in the /usr/local/bin directory and you won't have to type "./nowplaying" (or be in a certain directory) to use it.

that tunes script mentioned above is what I based my script off of. I used Nicecast to stream radio and SSH to control it. I don't have a website, but if someone has a place to recommend, I'll package it up. My script(s) supports basic playlist creation based on keywords too, and it's really easy to use.