By Collin Allen

Recent Tunes Update

April 30, 2005

I’ve been working on separating and cleaning up the code I use to run the Recent Tunes area of my sidebar so that it may be made into an easily installable sidebar item for any weblog via a PHP include() statement, but have run into a slight snag. The Recent Tunes application doesn’t work in Tiger and has been sold to someone, so I have no “easy” way of getting the iTunes track data to my webserver with no foreseeable hope of it being updated. It looks like I’ll have to come up with my own solution involving AppleScript. However, AppleScript is just not a language I can work with (I can’t live without {‘s!). If anyone could suggest a simple AppleScript that would grab important data from the current iTunes track and make it available to some other scripting language (PHP would be nice), that would be fantastic. I’ll probably end up putting that AppleScript into a shell script using osascript, then formatting and uploading that data with PHP, all run via cron on my local machine. I’m open to other suggestions, though. The only thing I need is the iTunes track data in a computer-readable format uploaded onto a FTP server. The rest I can change the code to fit. When this does turn into a useable project, you’ll surely get due credit.

I’ve also got a name picked out which has no (yes, zero) results on Google right now, so it will be distinguishable from other projects out there. More on that when I have things working again. For now, I’ve disabled that section of my sidebar.

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