How To Enable Hidden iTunes ”Now Playing” Notification On Mac OS X

Hidden deep in the new Lion OS X, turns out that a new iTunes Dock setting. Once you have activated it, a pop up notification of which iTunes track is currently playing will appear. You may prefer the native one found in Lion rather than programming Growl to show similar notifications.


Those running the latest Lion OS X 10.7 are going to have this feature available. You just need to activate it. After a few simple steps explained below, a window will pop up above the iTunes icon on the Dock each time a new track starts displaying the song title and the artist. The notification window is going to close automatically after a couple of seconds.
STEP 1: Before anything, you’ll need to close iTunes.
STEP 2: Open the Terminal (Applications > Utilities)
STEP 3: Enter the following command:

defaults write com.apple.dock itunes-notifications -bool TRUE;killall Dock

STEP 4: You have the option to customize it by adding the iTunes icon in the pop up along with the track info with the following command:

defaults write com.apple.dock notification-always-show-image -bool TRUE;killall Dock

Now launch iTunes and get ready to try it!
Some of you might find it distracting but for others it may turn out to be pretty cool . Nevertheless here are the steps to deactivate it just in case.
You can disable the “Now Playing” notification in Mac OS X by writing the below commands in the terminal:

defaults delete com.apple.dock itunes-notifications
defaults delete com.apple.dock notification-always-show-image;killall Dock

Keir Thomas came up with this tweak and shared it on Mac OS X hints. He mentioned that it came with bundled options which allowed for the change in width and height of the notification window. Apple may be working on a new notification system which is compatible with OS X applications but may not be ready to make it official.

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