iTunes Growl Support
I've been a fanatic of Growl since it was first released many years ago. The idea of a system-wide notification system is just plain awesomeness. The list of my daily apps that support growl has grown exponentially in the last few years and its great. iTunes is probably the most useful of all these implementations, especially the use of the myriad of iTunes controllers, widgets and hot keys. They all allow you to control iTunes in the background but supporting growl means you still know what you're doing. Surprising as it may seem though, none of them really support it properly. Here's the goal:
1. Send a growl notification with any iTunes update. This includes track changes, rating updates, pause/play actions, etc...
2. Allow for no other display options. I don't want a floater, widget or anything else crowding my screen. The purpose of Growl is to only notify you when you need to be notified.
3. Properly support my own meticulous use of album art loaded into iTunes.
So let's review the contenders:
CoverSutra is one of the most beautiful apps for the Mac currently out. It uses Leopards default HUD state for its control window which is fantastic for app consistency (are you reading this Twitterrific?). CoverSutra does support Growl, can live in the background and correctly grabs my artwork from iTunes. However, the type of Growl notifications it supports is extremely limited. It can only send a notification on a song change, and only when it happens naturally from a song ending ... it doesn't work if you use CS or iTunes to select "Next Song" or any other activity, e.g., changing a song rating.
I've had a few email exchanges with Sophia the developer and she seems mildly open to implementing this correctly but I won't hold my breath as I know she's an extremely busy indie-dev and I'm sure she's got a feature request list a mile long.
Synergy is by far the closest to achieving all goals. It sends proper updates to Growl on any update from iTunes. Not only that, but it even alerts growl of what the action you just did is. For instance, if I hit my "Pause" hotkey, the Growl notification will display "Paused: Track Title." The one glaring issue with Syenrgy however is that it can't properly grab your artwork from iTunes. Instead it tries to grab artwork from Amazon which is horribly inconsistent, poorly sized and a majority of the time just plain wrong.
The white border and washed out color of this album cover? That's because its some random image grabbed from Amazon, not my iTunes library.
The developer has stated that it asks iTunes for artwork first before searching Amazon, but in practice, it doesn't work. There's been a bug filed on it since 2005 so don't expect a fix anytime. Bummer.
Sizzling Keys for iTunes seems to work perfect by sending updates on every action and using proper artwork ... except it uses its own ugly floater instead of Growl. Again. Bummer.
Artwork is an app that displays an album widget on the desktop but it also supports Growl so I thought I'd try it out. Sadly, it didn't work out on any level. It provides no way to just not show the album widget and solely use the Growl notification aspect. And on top of that, its Growl framework seems to be the same as CoverSutra in only sending updates on natural track changes and nothing else.
GrowlTunes is the official plugin distributed from the Growl team in the official Growl download. Unfortunately its far from perfect. It always runs in the menu bar without a way to turn it off (although changing the icon to transparent in Photoshop works sorta-well). However, it still sends only limited updates to Growl, natural song changes. It does get the artwork correct, but again, proves to be limited.
OmniGrowl is a system preference that adds Growl support to a ton of unsupported apps, including iTunes. I was hopeful for this one as it seems to be such an extensive framework ... but no cigar again. This one is also hindered by the limited updates to Growl. I also noticed this one had some slight artwork issues which could be due to the multiple ways iTunes stores artwork and maybe reading only one.
TuneBar is a really cool idea for an app and supports Growl. Unfortunately by "supporting" growl, that means the same limited notifications that many of the other options suffer from. On top of that, its got some major performance issues.
ByteController is a little freeware app that's been around forever and used to be a contender with Synergy back in Panther days. I didn't expect this one to even work on Leopard, but not only does it work, it does almost everything perfect. It sends a Growl update on almost every iTunes action, including rating changes. It also grabs the correct artwork from iTunes no matter which method was used to add it. It does display a small controller in the menu bar, but it would be easy enough to make a fully transparent theme if that was too bothersome. My only 2 gripes with this one are that a) the hot keys are fairly limited meaning I have to run yet another app to get hot key support and b) it doesn't send a notification when you pause a track, and so it also doesn't let you know what you are doing, i.e., the way that Synergy does. But its close.
Notice the lack of "Playing:"
So for now, it looks like a combination of CoverSutra and ByteController will get you close ... but its still a little ways from perfect and a little bit annoying running 2 different apps to achieve something so simple.
Devs... please?
Update: A couple weeks later I discovered a good solution. I started using a outgoing connection firewall utility, in this case Little Snitch from Objective Development, to disallow Synergy's outgoing connections. This prevents Synergy from connection to Amazon and downloading crappy artwork, and then the app falls back on using the embeded artwork in iTunes which gives me the desired result. I still use utilities like CoverSutra and Cover Stream for the nice GUI. But for Growl support, shortcut key support and Audio Scrobble support, Synergy takes the gold.