The Hickensian

13.12.07

iTunes notifications over a network?

OK, this is a problem that has been puzzling us at Rissington. The four of us play music from iTunes to an office stereo, via AirTunes. Our music is all scrobbled, and lots of our apps use the Growl we’ve installed. It should, therefore, be easy to get some sort of notification of what is playing to all of us.

I know what you’re thinking, we should talk to each other, and simply ask whoever it is that’s broadcasting what you’re listening to. Well, yes, that’s what we do now, but it feels like all the pieces are there for some slick system, it just needs something to tie it together.

We’ve tried a few solutions, like applescripts to send updates to a twitter account, and the closest we’ve come to is the Network notifications in Growl, which does work. It works too well in fact, and now everyone gets notifications of files uploaded in Transmit, or new feeds in NetNewsWire.

Also, if anyone had any ideas of how to create a global ‘pause the music there’s a phone call’ button, I’m all ears! We once managed this by using Old Faithful™ as the sole music provider but that didn’t quite work out.

Can anyone can point us to an app or script or something to achieve this?

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No.1

Martin said 569 days ago:

Why not have music coming from one machine as before (which would see everyones music via sharing) and control it via VNC. If anyone wanted to pause a track just they could switch to their VNC client and hit pause. Inelegant? Sure. But it should work with multiple users.

No.2

Michael said 569 days ago:

You could use Signal, the iPhone iTunes App to pause. How did you get Growl notifications to work over the network? I am having a LOT of trouble with this and bug reports show that it is broken.

No.3

alex morris said 569 days ago:

this should be possible. Skype can broadcast what’s playing in your status so the data is there.

There used to be an app in the early days of iTunes that let shared users play/pause/skip tracks if I remember I will repost

No.4

alex morris said 569 days ago:

look into netTunes from shirt pocket software this should do what you need

No.5

Wilson Miner said 569 days ago:

It doesn’t solve your current problem (network notifications from whatever computer is streaming to all the other computers) but I did whip up a set of AppleScripts a while back to control iTunes on a specific network machine.

All the pause/play/next/back scripts notify Growl on the local machine of the current track playing on the server. One script is just for checking what track is playing, without controlling anything. I have them all mapped to function keys on my Apple keyboard via Quicksilver triggers. Saves me a lot of remote-desktopping and solves the pause-for-phone-call problem.

I provide them to you with absolutely no warranty whatsoever, since they’re horribly hacked together from other scripts, but they work for me! All you need to do is open each script and fill in the IP of the machine that’s running iTunes that you want to control. Enjoy!

No.6

Cawin said 569 days ago:

http://www.oatbit.com/~jg/index.php?w=newsite/files/remote_tunes/

These scripts are a a bit of a pain because you have to rename your itunes shared library BUT once attached to quicksilver triggers they are the bees knees.

This may not be the best solution for multiple users, it hurts my head to think about it and these may be exactly what Wilson has provided you but I can’t check from this computer.

Only other thought is some sort of shared lastfm account with a widget?

No.7

Jon Hicks said 569 days ago:

@Michael – you need to have the identical app installed and the growl for that enabled. For instance, it only worked when we both used iScrobbler for itunes notifications. Signal is good, but we don’t all have iphones or touches!

@alex – looked into that before, but didn’t get on with it, also not Leopard yet.

No.8

Jedidiah said 569 days ago:

Have you looked at patioTunes? http://www.mindola.com/patiotunes/

It gives you an address everyone on the network can put into a browser and control itunes. You can control the music from your phone if it has wifi.

Costs $15, so about £7. It works well but can take a few minutes to start up if your music library is quite large.

No.9

Stefan Seiz said 568 days ago:

Have a look at Remote Buddy: http://www.iospirit.com/remotebuddy/ awesome app. Does a whole lot more than iTunes and works via IR-Remotes or an ajax interface in Safari on a Mac or iPhone…

No.10

crouchingbadger said 568 days ago:

One word: Squirrels

No.11

Killian said 568 days ago:

I don’t personally do this, but my friend uses Adium as an Mac OSX chat client and it keeps her ITunes current song as her status message. Pretty neat assuming you are a mac person. Btw love the Rissington podcast re-sizable background/foreground clouds.

Adium

No.12

sam said 568 days ago:

Install Mpd (http://musicpd.org) on the music broadcasting machine. Install Mpd clients (Theremin for MacOS, GMpc for GNU/Linux) to control the music. Everybody knows what’s playing through the client’s ability to notify locally (Theremin via Growl, GMPC via a slick notification popup). Everybody can pause the music when there’s a phone call.

Apple software is great, but just not /that/ great. The funky solutions that you guys came up with and the one I can see in the comments are just ugly, because you’re not using the right tool to do the job.

My 2 ¢, – Sam

No.13

Jon Hicks said 567 days ago:

@sam – That’s just it though, there isn’t a single machine to broadcast from. If mpd allowed to you play music via shared itunes (or whatever) then it would be a solution. The client apps look a bit basic too.

The Remote Buddy interface is wonderful (I use that at home), but again, there’s no way to play music from the other 3 iTunes libraries. I think the play/pause thing may have been a bit of a red herring though – our AirTunes system works really well, we just want a way of seeing ‘what’s currently playing’

No.14

Switch said 567 days ago:

On Windows there is this iTunes plugin called AMIP, and you can do whatever you want with the now-playing data. I used to let it write to a .txt file that was in a shared folder, and on another computer I’d use mIRC to read the file and show everyone what song I was playing.

Dunno, maybe it’s useful for you guys. AMIP has stopped working for me though, but it seems that’s just me.

No.15

Jeff Khonsary said 566 days ago:

We have been struggling with this one for a while too.

The Adium solution does work. You could great a single AIM or gmail account, and then route all your itunes status through it. From there, you can grab it either straight from Adium, or through AppleScript to GeekTool or something. We were using this for awhile in our studio — combined with SSH and terminal commands to pause/play the remote itunes apps. This is with only two computers though. Seems like your set up is a bit more complicated :).

Maybe the Songbird folks will figure this out?

No.16

Craig said 566 days ago:

I use a program called Coversutra which displays album art, but it also has a built in Growl notification for song titles, or album changes, perhaps there would be a way to hijack that and broadcast that over the network?

No.17

Christopher said 565 days ago:

It might be possible if you could log into two last.fm accounts simultaneously.

That way, you could have an account for the office that all of you upload stats to. I submit tracks from both a Windows PC and a Mac throughout the day and it seems to work.