EDIT: Rainmeter now has a plugin for iTunes, so my script is no longer necessary. This page is retained as a retrospective.

Earlier this evening I read a Lifehacker post on how to display the currently playing track in iTunes on your desktop with Rainmeter.  Many of the commenters had the same complaint as me: that it seemed needlessly complicated.  Remembering having read about how to script iTunes on, of all things, a Microsoft webpage, I decided to set about creating a solution of my own.  This is the result, a simple script that I think should run on any Windows PC that iTunes will.

Simply run the script to begin monitoring iTunes (which doesn’t have to be running yet).  When a track is playing, its title, the artist, and album will be written to a user-specified file, which can then be displayed on the desktop using Rainmeter (a sample skin is provided below).  If iTunes is stopped or closed, the file will be cleared, leaving a blank space on the desktop.

By default, the file used is D:\rainmeter_itunes_playing.txt, and checks are made every 2 seconds.  Change these values if they’re not suitable for your particular setup.

WARNING: Vista will not be happy if you change it to C:\rainmeter_itunes_playing.txt—instead use C:\Users\YOUR_USERNAME\rainmeter_itunes_playing.txt, where YOUR_USERNAME should obviously be replaced by your username. And remember to change the Rainmeter skin file to match.

If you need to stop the script for whatever reason, you’ll have to use Task Manager and select wscript.exe, then click End Process.

• rainmeter_itunes.vbs, the VBScript that interacts with iTunes
• now_playing.ini, the Rainmeter config for displaying that info on your desktop
• NowPlaying.zip, a zip file of the two above files, to save you downloading them separately

All files are released under a GPLv3 licence.