Getting live updates of what song is playing in iTunes isn’t difficult these days with the dozen or so applications that provide the feature. But, the problem with these applications is that, well, they’re applications, eating up your valuable system resources. An excellent tip has surfaced on Macworld’s Mac OS X Hints page that solves the problem, and puts your track information directly in your dock, courtesy of iTunes.
If you’re comfortable with the terminal and typing in commands (or copying and pasting them) you can get artist and track information directly from your iTunes icon.
Here are the steps:
- Quit iTunes, duh
- Open the terminal, and paste this command: defaults write com.apple.dock itunes-notifications -bool TRUE;killall Dock
- Done
If you want to delete the new notification, you just have to paste this into the terminal: ‘defaults delete com.apple.dock notification-always-show-image;killall Dock’
A new notification will popup over the iTunes logo in your dock every time a new track plays. Pretty fun stuff. You can now retire that standalone application that seems to be eating up your CPU cycles that you need to surf the Internet at work.
Source: Macworld: Mac OS X Hints
