Monday, July 26, 2010

Clone Amarok (1.2 of course) on OSX



Above is a screen shot of thje windows I have cobbled together to simulate the music listening experience of Amarok 1.2. Upper Left is of course the iTunes Window. It is on top of the album art viewer window also a part of itunes. That covers the boring bit of the Last.Fm application which loads artist info. Finally i have the tunesTEXT widget to retrieve and display lyrics.

To get the widget to stay on your desktop you have to put the Dashboard in developer mode. Which is done with the terminal.

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES


type that in terminal and you can drag widgets out from your dashboard to your desktop. just click and holding the widget while you press f12.

You can customize how itunes displays your track listing of course or ditch it altogether and use the visualizer instead of the Album art window. Here is an example using the iVisulize plugin.



PS. By the way if you use two monitors you may not be able to get visualizations to start on the secondary display. This happens to me when their default setting is full screen. I have to start the visualizer with the iTunes window on the primary display (it has the Apple Menu Bar) and then escaping from full screen. Once the visualizer is windowed you can move itunes back to the secondary display.

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