show what users are listening to on itunes in network

Question

I'm on a network with a couple of people that all listen to music using iTunes (Mac and PC). I want to build a web page that will publish the track, artist and the logged in user's name. A user will need to be able to easily toggle whether they want their music displayed or not. The idea is similar to IM clients where it says what you are listening to except this will be posted on a web page. The web page is using PHP/MySQL. I realize I couldn't use PHP to do this, though how would I create a script to capture this information and then be used to display on a web page? Is there an iTunes add-on or how would I go about this?

An example of the output would be: jaysonp is listening to "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

Well last.fm works by having a plugin for iTunes that submits data about the currently playing song, presumably to a script that records that information and displays it on the website, so it's certainly possible that way. You would, however, need to write the iTunes plugin as well if you use this approach.

iTunes 10 did introduce Ping, which does also record data about the music you're playing. Whether this data is available publicly in a machine readable form I don't know. However, if it is, then you could collect the Ping data for your users and use that to generate your web page. I'm not very familiar with Ping, however, so couldn't tell you for sure if this is possible or not, but it may be worth investigating. It would also mean that all your users would have to be signed up for Ping,