Have iTunes Tell You What’s Playing In The Dock [OS X Tips]

By

Dock Notification

Playing music through iTunes is something we do every day. It’s great to be told what track is playing when it starts, but not everyone wants to run a system notification app like Growl. If you still want to be see what the current iTunes track is, check out today’s tip.

Mac OS X Lion has a nifty feature that’s not enabled by default, nor is it available in the iTunes preferences. To make a small notification button pop up in the dock, launch Terminal and then type or paste the following code into the window:

defaults write com.apple.dock itunes-notifications -bool YES

Next, be sure to type or paste the following familiar command into Terminal, to restart the Dock server:

killall Dock

Now, launch iTunes and start playing a song. You can wait for it to end, or hit the next track button. Either way, you’ll see a cool little Dock notification badge with the Title and Artist of the track that just started playing.

If you decide that this is too distracting, you can set it back to the original non-notification default by issuing the above two commands again. This time, however, replace the final word in the command with NO, like this:

defaults write com.apple.dock itunes-notifications -bool NO

Then issue the killall Dock command and you’re good to go.

[Source: Mac OS X Tips]

Got an OS X tip? Need help troubleshooting OS X? Drop me a line or leave a comment below.

Newsletters

Daily round-ups or a weekly refresher, straight from Cult of Mac to your inbox.

  • The Weekender

    The week's best Apple news, reviews and how-tos from Cult of Mac, every Saturday morning. Our readers say: "Thank you guys for always posting cool stuff" -- Vaughn Nevins. "Very informative" -- Kenly Xavier.