Let a Toaster tell you what iTunes is playing
I’ve got what I think is a pretty extensive iTunes library with somewhere around 3000 songs. Having that many songs means I forget what some of the songs are, and even after the first few seconds of the song playing, I still can’t tell, just from listening, what the song is.
You might ask, "who cares what the song is?" Well… I care! I keep pretty much every MP3 I rip from a CD I own or buy from iTunes, even if I get sick of the song because you never know when you might want to hear it again.
I listen to my iPod at work but when I’m home working at my PC I’ll usually turn on iTunes, hit play (with shuffle enabled) and get busy with my music playing in the background. My attention isn’t on iTunes which is another factor to my not knowing what song is playing now.
The thing is, I want to know what song is playing but I don’t want to have to switch to iTunes to be able to tell. This is where iTunes Toaster comes in.
iTunes Toaster is a free plug in for the PC version of iTunes that will pop up a notifier window when iTunes changes songs. It shows the song, artist, album, album art, and even has controls to go to the previous song, pause, or go to the next song.
What I like about iTunes Toaster is you can change the look and position of the notifier window. You can also affect if the notifier window fades in and out, or just appears and disappears, and you can also change how long the window stays visible. The default time is 3.5 seconds but I like my notifier window to stay up at least 10 seconds. This way, even if I hear the song change, I’m in no hurry to glance down if my attention is elsewhere.
You can click here to get iTunes Toaster for free. Just unzip the zip file and copy its contents to the iTunes plugins folder. The default installation location for iTunes on a PC is C:\Program Files\iTunes so you’ll want to dump all of the iTunes Toaster files into C:\Program Files\iTunes\plug-ins. If you don’t have a plug-ins folder, just create one in the C:\Program Files\iTunes folder then put the iTunes Toaster files there.
The iTunes Toaster site says Toaster works with iTunes 7.1 but I’m using iTunes 7.5 and it works fine so you should be good to go as long as you’re using at least iTunes 7.1. If you’re not using iTunes at all you can get it for free at www.itunes.com.
Do you use a different iTunes notifier plugin or program? If so, what is it and what do you like about it? Or, are you looking for a notifier plugin and found this article? If so, let us know how you like iTunes Toaster in the comments!
