I use a 'now playing' script for seeing my last played artist in tmux. Here's
what it looks like:
{% gist 6406054 %}It's in a loop because I use the [daemons] gem to run it in the background.
The documentation is quite good and it has come in handy for many little
scripts I've written to run in the background of my computer.
If the connection fails (i.e. if there's no internet), the script will use an
Applescript script to get the artist from iTunes:
{% gist 6406069 %}This isn't a foolproof system because if I'm in a situation where I don't have
internet, it's pretty likely I'm listening to music on my phone. My phone is
scrobbling to Last.fm, so I'm losing information because one of my devices
isn't connected. I can't really think of an alternate solution here, besides
tethering my laptop. My data plan would not cooperate with that kind of thing,
so I'm left with a bit of an edgecase bug.
[daemons]: http://daemons.rubyforge.org/