Now Playing Script

I use a ‘now playing’ script for seeing my last played artist in tmux. Here’s what it looks like:

{% gist 6406054 %}

It’s in a loop because I use the daemons gem to run it in the background. The documentation is quite good and it has come in handy for many little scripts I’ve written to run in the background of my computer.

If the connection fails (i.e. if there’s no internet), the script will use an Applescript script to get the artist from iTunes:

{% gist 6406069 %}

This isn’t a foolproof system because if I’m in a situation where I don’t have internet, it’s pretty likely I’m listening to music on my phone. My phone is scrobbling to Last.fm, so I’m losing information because one of my devices isn’t connected. I can’t really think of an alternate solution here, besides tethering my laptop. My data plan would not cooperate with that kind of thing, so I’m left with a bit of an edgecase bug.