For the music lovers out there, DockArt takes the “Now Playing” notification concept a step further and actually replaces the iTunes Dock icon on the Mac with the currently playing albums cover art.

How to Replace the iTunes Dock Icon with Currently Playing Album Art on Mac

This is how you get DockArt working:

Download DockArt for free from the developers page

Quit iTunes

From the Mac OS X Desktop, hit Command+Shift+G to bring up the “Go To Folder” window and enter the following directory path:

~/Library/iTunes/iTunes Plug-Ins/ Drag the ‘DockArt.bundle’ file into that folder

Relaunch iTunes and start playing a song

You can further customize DockArt by going to “View > Visualizer > Options”, where you’ll see options to adjust the icon size, show the iTunes badge, progress bar, etc.

To get the most out of this plugin, use the iTunes “Get Album Art” feature to fill in any blank covers in your music collection.

If an album or song doesn’t have cover art associated with it, the default iTunes icon gets displayed instead.

DockArt is a free iTunes plugin that is compatible with iTunes 10.4 or later, but has been confirmed to work in iTunes 10.5.1. Let us know in the comments if you find it works with other versions of iTunes as well.

This plugin generally looks best with larger Docks or with magnification enabled or using the magnify dock icon keyboard shortcut trick to see the most detail. You can even use the super-size Dock if you want jumbo album art.

Thanks to Andrey for the tip from the comments!