gotjuice: foobar can handle half ratings - but like tore said, you have to come up with a way to show them using 'text'
Cadrian: try CD Art Display instead. absolutely no better tool for "now playing" gadgets.
tore: no icon option for currently playing unless you change to a different playlist component called ELPlaylist, but then things get incredibly complicated because it's much harder to script.
in my screenshots you can see i just use a little green triangle to point to the currently playing song. when i get home from work i can post the script for it.
and yes you can do playlist stripes, i have a script for that too that i'll post in a few hours
