How To: Enable Hidden “Now Playing” iTunes Notifications On Your Mac

The Next Web is reporting a very cool new little hack for Mac computers running OS X Lion (10.7 and above). It appears that within the Mac OS X Lion operating system lays some hidden functionality that was not revealed to the public. This hidden functionality is the ability to enable native iTunes “Now Playing” notifications that will appear in the dock of your Mac. Currently it is not known why Apple has not yet publicized this feature, but some predict that Apple plans on implementing a new notification system in OS X Lion which will be released shortly in an upcoming update.

I know a lot of you probably use Growl to enable a similar functionality, but if you are looking for native functionality for “Now Playing” notifications then this little hack will be your best bet! In this How To guide you will learn how to enable hidden iTunes notifications within the Mac OS X Lion operating system.

Enable Hidden iTunes Notifications

Step 1) – The first thing you are going to need to do is open up Terminal on your Mac computer. Additionally, ensure that iTunes is not running!

Once Terminal is open and you have double checked that iTunes has been closed you will need to enter the following command into terminal and then press Enter.

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

Step 2) – After the above command has been entered you can open iTunes and start playing a track. You should now notice a new pop-up window appears with the name of the song that is currently playing.

Although this works you may notice, however, that the iTunes icon is not present in the popup. If you would like to add the iTunes icon to the pop-up window, simply enter the following command into the Terminal window (make sure you close iTunes before entering the Terminal command):

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

When you play a song through iTunes now you will notice the added iTunes icon.

Optional Deletion: If you do not like this functionality, and would simply like to remove it. Open up your Terminal window, close iTunes and enter the following commands:

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

Let us know if you enabled these hidden “Now Playing” notifications on your Mac computer by following this how to guide in the comments section below. For more how to’s from iJailbreak.com, visit the how to section by clicking here.