Put iTunes “Now Playing” Message In Your Mountain Lion Notification Center [OS X Tips]

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Now Playing is now in your Notification Center, where it belongs.
Now Playing is now in your Notification Center, where it belongs.

Back in April, we told you about a nifty way to bring a “Now Playing” message from iTunes to your Dock. Now that Mountain Lion is out, that feature is missing. Luckily, there’s another slick way to get a notification of the track name and info right in Notification Center. Which sort of makes sense, since that’s where notifications go.

Using a third-party app from MediaFire, NowPlaying, you can make this happen on your own Mac running OS X 10.8, more commonly known as Mountain Lion.

Download NowPlaying from MediaFire and unzip the resulting file. Then, go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General and change “Allow applications downloaded from:” to “Anywhere,” if it isn’t already set that way. This will make sure that the new Gatekeeper feature in OS X allows you to run the new app.

Put NowPlaying into the Applications folder, and then double click to launch it. Now start a song in iTunes, and you’ll see the track name and artist appear in a Notification. Hit forward or back to switch songs, and it’ll happen again. Sweet!

To make this a permanent feature on your Mac, the developers suggest putting NowPlaying into your login items in System Preferences > Users & Groups. Select your account in the left-hand pane, then select the Login Items tab on the right. Press the little plus button under the list of items, and then choose NowPlaying app from the Applications folder. Then click the Add button. Now when you restart your computer and log in, NowPlaying will launch and you’ll get iTunes notifications without having to start the app on your own each time.

Via: OS X Daily

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