Show a “Now Playing” Song Notification from iTunes in OS X Notification Center

Aug 13, 2012 - 17 Comments

Show a "Now Playing" song alert from iTunes in Notification Center

Previous versions of Mac OS X allowed you to see a “Now Playing” notification pop up over the iTunes Dock icon, the alert showed the song and artist name anytime a track switched and is a really popular tweak. It turns out that hidden feature is missing from OS X Mountain Lion, but with the help of a third party tool we can add a similar feature that pushes an alert of the current song and artist to Notification Center in OS X instead.

How to Get a “Now Playing” iTunes Alert in Notification Center

You will need OS X 10.8 (or later) for this to work:

The developer recommends rebooting the Mac to get the feature to work but we found it unnecessary, with just a relaunch of iTunes being sufficient in our testing.

Every time you switch songs the notification will appear over the desktop then get sent to the general Notification Center panel, though it’s smart enough to not have your entire playlist pile on top of each other in OS X’s Notification Center.

iTunes Song alert in Notification Center within Mac OS X

For those interested in how this works, it’s done through a modification to the awesome terminal-notifier tool that we wrote about recently.

We reached out to the developer to try and find a better hosting service than MediaFire since we know it’s blocked on some networks, we’ll update the link when possible.

Thanks to Ben for creating this!

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Related articles:

Posted by: William Pearson in Customize, iTunes, Mac OS, Tips & Tricks

17 Comments

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  1. uncle says:

    Is there a Windows version for this?

  2. Alex says:

    ive amended this for the new iTunes if anyone wants it?

    https://dl.dropbox.com/u/36135788/Now%20Playing.dmg.zip

  3. Kevin says:

    I’m on Mac OS 10.8.2 and Now Playing works immediately after installing but stops working as soon as I restart iTunes. I can’t get it to work again without reinstalling. Advice?

  4. Ryan says:

    I found a small bug with this. If you preview a song on the iTunes store, the alert pops up with the info of the last song you played from your library.

  5. Avenged110 says:

    Is this broken in 10.8.1 for anyone else? Mine just stopped working and now asks me to locate Spotify (which I do not use). Worked fine before the update.

  6. Ted says:

    Amazingly useful!

  7. BP says:

    How do I uninstall it?

    I can’t get it out of Notification Center!

    Please, someone.

    • Ryan says:

      Just find where you saved “Now Playing.app” and drag that to the trash. It might still be open and not let you empty the trash. Restart, empty trash.

  8. Avenged110 says:

    Ok, that’s actually pretty cool

  9. BlackOozaru says:

    Perfect !!

  10. Han says:

    Thanks!

  11. Alec O'Grady says:

    This also works with Spotify

  12. iurids says:

    I didn’t even need to relaunch iTunes. It just appeared after opening it. Awesome tweak!!

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