iTunes Now Playing In Perl

After working on the C# iTunes Now Playing program, I thought I’d give the Perl Win32::OLE module a try.

This module is Activestate Perl‘s COM interface for Microsoft Windows.

After using Perl for nearly 8 years, I’ve never given it a try before, and it turns out to be surprisingly easy to use.

The following script works exactly the same way as the C# version.

Firstly we need to create a new iTunes.Application object.

my $iTunesApp = new Win32::OLE("iTunes.Application");

Next we get the current track and print the name and artist.

my $track = $iTunesApp->CurrentTrack;

print "Current Track: " . $track->Name . "nCurrent Artist: " . $track->Artist . "n"

And that’s it. Obviously we should be checking to make sure the objects were create correctly, but this is just a simple example, not live code.

So to recap, here’s the final working example code.

#!/usr/bin/perl


use strict;

use Win32::OLE;


my $iTunesApp = new Win32::OLE("iTunes.Application");

my $track = $iTunesApp->CurrentTrack;

print "Current Track: " . $track->Name . "nCurrent Artist: " . $track->Artist . "n"