Hiding the GrowlTunes menu bar icon

Update: You can now find this hint on macosxhints.com, along with some (hopefully) helpful comments.

GrowlTunes is a nice little app included with the default Growl distribution. It watches iTunes and then whenever a song changes pops up a notification window giving details about the track, album art, your rating etc.

Something that has really annoyed me about GrowlTunes is the relatively useless icon in the menu bar taking up space. For such a small and simple task, all I wanted GrowlTunes to do was show me what track was playing.

Well, today I found this really simple tip on bpeople.org which solves the problem splendidly. Just type into a Terminal window

defaults write com.growl.growltunes GrowlTunesWithoutMenu 1

restart GrowlTunes.app, and hey presto: GrowlTunes is very unobtrusively doing its job.

Before:

After:

Seeing as you no longer have access to the menu commands to stop GrowlTunes, you can do so by opening Activity Monitor (usually located under /Applications/Utilities), finding the GrowlTunes process in the list, and cling the Quit Process button.

Note: If for any reason you wish to undo this change, just type the same command above but with a ’0′ instead of a ’1′.