As mentioned over in the mini-monitor article, I created an iTunes monitor that takes up way less space than the program’s floaty window thing, as well as being geeky-cool. Here’s the screenshot:

(click for full size)

This monitor combines a couple of different tools. First up is GeekTool, which you can use to create an arbitrary number of monitor windows.

Next was the iTunes Command Line Control by David Schlosnagle (glommed onto via this MacOSXHints story), a spiffy shell script that allows you to control and get the status of iTunes from the Terminal. Sweetness. I made a few cosmetic adjustments to the script’s output for its “status” command, but otherwise what I’m using is David’s as written. Save the script in your $PATH.

In the GeekTool PreferencePane, create a new entry and make it a “shell” window. Give the full path to your itunes shell script and pass it the “status” flag, like this:

/Users/rdaeley/bin/itunes status

I have it on a refresh of 12 seconds, which seems adequate for my needs.

Adjust the “Colors and font” and “Text” as desired. For a font, I’m using 11pt Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, as shown in the above screenshot.

You can place the window anywhere you’d like and make it whatever size. I have mine fairly wide, since I’m including song title, artist, and album in my status report. The window in my setup is x:577, y:835, w:703, h:20.

And that’s pretty much it. I hide my large iTunes window and control it almost exclusively through the Terminal nowadays, which is great since I spend most of my time there.