OverviewNow Playing allows you to see what's playing in iTunes. It also let's you browse though your iTunes library to pick what you want to play. Now Playing 0.5 was basically built from the ground up with help from Ronan Dowling (who made the Running Applications.tapp). Ronan Dowling was responsible all of the heavy lifting PHP underwork that makes 0.5 be able to run without having an application running on your computer. Get Now PlayingGet the latest release, Version 0.5 alpha 2 for Leopard or Tiger. How to use- Install Now Playing
- Open Now Playing through iPhone Remote (Now Playing data is refreshed every 2 seconds)
- Tap the album art placeholder to bring up the scrubber bar (visual only) and time things.
- If you want to browse trough iTunes tap the arrow in the top left
Note about browsing through iTunesWhen you find the song you want to play, you can do the following: - Tap the song name to start playing the song and go to the now playing screen
- Tap the arrow that points down to play the song on your iPhone (format permitting)
- Tap the arrow that points to the right to play the song without moving (play in the background basically)
ScreenshotsCurrent Issues- Trying to access artists and albums with certain characters fails (eg: things with “&”, “ ‘ “, and “+”)
- Two versions (one for Tiger and the other for Leopard) exist, ideally there should be one
- If you try to access a large list of things (eg, a playlist with a lot of songs (somewhere above 3000?) it may fail to load the list
- Now Playing doesn’t filter out tracks that are protected (to exclude the download button) like the old version yet
- The album button in the top right doesn't do anything right now
- Not much fault tolerance when iTunes is not open.
- Long song names, album names, or artists don't look great on the Now Playing screen, really long ones sometimes go the next line which is not ideal.
- Repeat 1 image is missing. If someone has a copy of it from their iPhone can you send it to me?
Roadmap- Be able to "flip" the album over and get it's other tracks and rate the current song
Source and CopyrightAll the files, except the Now Playing Service.app, are not locked in any way. If you right click on the Now Playing.tapp and click "Show Package Contents" you can find all of the files that are used. The source for the Now Playing Service.app can be found, zipped up, in the svn.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
You are free to use this, and all resource files, for non-commercial purposes, and as long as you share-alike and give attribution to the original creator (me, Neil Daniels and co-developer, Ronan Dowling). Contact- Comments? Feedback? Questions? Suggestions? Concerns? Email me at Neil.Here@gmail.com
- If you found a bug, error, or problem of that nature, please post it in the "Issues" tab. Please mention that the problem is related to Now Playing in the title.
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The ability to select artist, songs or playlists would be amazing. Great app! I'll keep checking back. Keep up the good work!
The ability to select artist, songs or playlists would be amazing. Great app! I'll keep checking back. Keep up the good work!
That would be great, however, this is designed to show what is currently playing. I would much rather have someone else, with more know how, to make a song, artist, album, and playlist selector. Doing something like that requires a really good application on the Mac side of things in order to get all of this information. I just don't know how I would go around doing something like that with my limited knowledge of making applications (OK, I can do AppleScript? and that is about it, the Now Playing Service is actually just a really glorified version of AppleScript?).
If you want to check out a really good iTunes selector for the iPhone I suggest trying out Remote Buddy. Their iPhone interface is really good.
I do think that I could throw in a rating system into Now Playing, but I just don't have the time right now.
Hi all,
Before coming across this project on the web, I decided to make my iPhone into a remote for iTunes on my computer. I've got a little program thrown together that lets you select playlists and songs. Screenshot here:
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It interfaces through iTunes using the "iTunes COM for Windows SDK" (http://developer.apple.com/sdk/itunescomsdk.html). When you launch my program it listens for connections from the iPhone browser. It serves the pages like any other web server, except it reads the URL for special commands then performs the appropriate action for that command. Once iTunes is manipulated, my program builds an XML file containing the song lists and the "now playing" info. The XML file gets sent back to the browser, which updates all the items on the page. The browser page interfaces back to the program with AJAX calls to keep everything up to date.
I would love to contribute to this project, but unfortunately I won't be able to since I write software for PCs. If this has already been done, that's great too! It really comes in handy when I have people over and I can control the music from anywhere in my house.
That looks really nice. Your little app there works almost in the same way that Now Playing does. Except for my little monitor application does it's stuff with AppleScript?. I am curious about what method you use (if any) to detect if the song has changed. My AppleScript? checks other second, compares the song information, and if it is different it builds part of the HTML (wish I had done it in XML) that contains the song information and also generates the album artwork. I check every other second, or else the script would go off building HTML snippits and then grabbing the album art all the time, eating up resources.
Do you have a place to download your application? And is your application open source? Please contact me at Neil.Here@gmail.com.
awesome, how about being able to select airport expresses?! i.e. select speakers, then it'd give us all sonos like ability, much cooler and much cheaper :) good work :)
How about streaming to the iphone/ipod Touch? Dot.Tunes is ok - but rather use this!
windows? :(
This is definitely awesome; continued updates would be great. An essential piece of software I would say!
uh wow. amazing.
how about a fullscreen button for when watching videos? I dont mind using front row but it would be much easier to go right to a particular episode and start playing it in full screen.
that said really nice work I use this app all the time when controlling music. It's much better than jsut the itunes remote in uniremote
I second noelpilot. Make this like the Sonos!
I would digg it if a rating function would be implemented! heck, I'd do it myself if I knew how =/
Dig the app though =)
(airtunes + ratings and this would be a easy choice over remote buddy) BTW, this is a really nice way of creating your own "sonos" network, for a much lower cost =)
Hey. A little bug. When the song has quotes, back slashes appear. I know this is to escape character, but it's kinda bothersome. But, it is awesome anyway! A small hat-tip to you all.
This application works beautifully locally! I am having trouble getting media to stream remotely unfortunately, does anybody have any tips?
Great work on this app Neil.Here.
Whenever I access the Now Playing tapp on my iphone, my macs cpu usage shoots up to about 75 %. It seems to only do this when I'm on the now playing screen displaying album art.
Is this a bug, or is the cpu usage necessary?
If the cpu usage is necessary to show album art, would there be a way to simply disable the display of album art?
Would like to see and select the AirSpeakers? that the music plays on. Anyone running a Mac Mini as a media server would love to be able to select the music to play and the speakers to hear it from!
I love this program! But it would be nice to automatically switch to the next song in the set when you are streaming. Otherwise I have no problems with it and it is amazing!