Previous versions of Mac OS X allowed you to see a “Now Playing” notification pop up over the iTunes Dock icon, the alert showed the song and artist name anytime a track switched and is a really popular tweak. It turns out that hidden feature is missing from OS X Mountain Lion, but with the help of a third party tool we can add a similar feature that pushes an alert of the current song and artist to Notification Center in OS X instead.

How to Get a “Now Playing” iTunes Alert in Notification Center

You will need OS X 10.8 (or later) for this to work:

Download NowPlaying from MediaFire and unzip it

Place “Now Playing” in your /Applications/ folder and then control+click the app and select “Open” to get around the GateKeeper app warning and launch the application

Quit out of iTunes and relaunch it, then play a song to see the Notification Center alert

The developer recommends rebooting the Mac to get the feature to work but we found it unnecessary, with just a relaunch of iTunes being sufficient in our testing.

Every time you switch songs the notification will appear over the desktop then get sent to the general Notification Center panel, though it’s smart enough to not have your entire playlist pile on top of each other in OS X’s Notification Center.

For those interested in how this works, it’s done through a modification to the awesome terminal-notifier tool that we wrote about recently.

We reached out to the developer to try and find a better hosting service than MediaFire since we know it’s blocked on some networks, we’ll update the link when possible.

Thanks to Ben for creating this!