NowPlaying iTunes Integration

For those of you who have a license for Brandon Fuller’s NowPlaying hack for iTunes, here’s a small snippet of code which you can integrate directly into your sidebar, header or the like. The function itself would ideally be placed in your functions.php file, that way you can call upon the get_itunes() function from any page.

NowPlaying automatically exports an XML file containing things such as a URI for album artwork, the album name, date, song title etc. and is capable of uploading the XML file automatically to your webserver if you run WordPress on a separate server.

I don’t know about you guys, but I have a small obsession with letting people know what I am listening to. The license for the plugin is about ten bux, so IMO, it’s worth it.

This Snippet aught to go into functions.php :

function get_itunes($tag)
{
$np_xml = 'Enter Your XML URI Here!';
$xml_parser = xml_parser_create();

if ( is_file( $np_xml ) )
{
   xml_parse_into_struct( $xml_parser, file_get_contents($np_xml), $vals, $index );
   xml_parser_free( $xml_parser );

   if ( $vals[ $index["NOW_PLAYING"][0] ]["attributes"]["PLAYING"] == 1 )
   {
		parse_str($vals[$index["URLAPPLE"][0]]["value"],$tmp);
		$vals[$index["URLAPPLE"][0]]["value"]=rawurldecode($tmp["amp;RD_PARM1"]);
		return htmlentities($vals[ $index[$tag][0] ]["value"],ENT_QUOTES,'UTF-8');
   }
   else
   {
      return false;
   }
}
}

You can call the function with the following tags, one at a time:

TITLE
ARTIST
ALBUM
GENRE
KIND
TRACK
NUMTRACKS
YEAR
COMMENTS
TIME
BITRATE
RATING
DISC
NUMDISCS
PLAYCOUNT
COMPILATION
URLAMAZON
URLAPPLE
IMAGESMALL
IMAGE
IMAGELARGE
COMPOSER
GROUPING
FILE
ARTWORKID

For an example, take a look at my sidebar at http://www.joshblake.net. And for the link to NowPlaying, take a look here: http://brandon.fuller.name/archives/hacks/nowplaying/

Josh