You may or may not have noticed that the song listing on the left is pretty dynamic and recently has included the album cover for the most recently played song.

I used to do this all manually with an applescript with a bit of shell that I’d hacked together, running every 10 seconds in a hidden geektool panel. My script was very very ugly. I uploaded 2008 lines of text that already existed on the other side because it was easier for my ignorant non-programmer skills to produce and broadband with compression can upload a 600K file quick enough to make it not matter. But I knew how lame that was.

I’ve just finished upgrading to a third party Wordpress plugin, cg-whattunes, which fetches amazon art, accepts the currently playing track and caches it. The nice part is that it caches the history locally for me so I only need to HTTP POST songs using curl as they change.

iTunes still lacks the ability to trigger events on track changing, so I’m still forced to use a good bit of my old script, modified to work specifically with cg-whattunes every 10 seconds in a hidden geektool panel.

Still a nasty ugly kludge, but hay look, album art. Note: If you use cg-whattunes out of the box it won’t look like mine on the sidebar, I hacked the output a bit. 😉