See What’s Playing on Spotify or ITunes in Your Mac’s Menu Bar
Mac: When you plug in background music while browsing the web, doing work, or chatting with friends, a song you really like may appear in one of your playlists. The more often this happens throughout the day, the more distracted and fragmented your work will be – and you can never focus on your studies, making money, or raiding an MMO if you keep returning to iTunes or Spotify. to see what’s playing.
Solution? Download the lightweight utility SpotMenu . Place it in your Applications folder, set it to Open at Login, and a tiny music note icon will appear in the Mac menu bar. Nothing happens until you upload the song to Spotify or iTunes. And when you do, your menu bar will fill with the artist, title, and album of the song.
Click any part of the giant flow of text and a small window with album art will appear below the menu bar. Hover over it to pause a track, skip to another section of a song, or skip back and forth in your playlist.
And, yes, you can click the icon a second time and click Settings to fine tune what you see on your menu bar, so listening to something from, say, those who tell the truth will die, those who tell the truth will live forever by Explosions in the Sky does not spoil the whole installation.
(If the information about your song does not fit in the free space on the menu bar, nothing will appear – at the time of this writing. Perhaps the author of the utility will build some fancy way of scrolling the text or add automatic ellipsis to extra-long lines of information.)