Filed under: Design, Utilities, Lists
CD Art Display is a great little utility that puts the album art for the music you’re listening to right on your desktop. It works with numerous players (iTunes, Foobar2000, Winamp, Helium, Windows Media Player, and more), and it shows you the album art for whatever track is currently playing with a beautiful skin. The art has to be in the album’s folder, but if you don’t already have it, CD Art Display can help you find it (it has a feature for automatically downloading covers).
Since it already interfaces with your player, CD Art Display also lets you switch to the next or previous track, pause/play, change the volume, and even rate the song and find and display its lyrics (right in the program, not in a pop-up browser window). It’s pretty neat stuff!
CD Art Display isn’t new; the last stable version (2.0.1) was released on September 8, 2009. The program is certainly not dead, though; CD Art Display 3.0 Beta was last updated on July 12, so it seems like development is definitely ongoing.
There are currently over 200 skins in the official gallery, so picking nine was tricky. However, I used the program’s built-in browser to go through lots and lots of skins, installing and testing, until I found nine skins that I really liked. You can check them out after the jump!
Polaroid.silens, which I could find only in the in-app skin browser and not in the site gallery, is a simple skin. Featuring no controls or integrated lyrics panel, it simply puts the album art in a “Polaroid” frame, stacked on top of some other Polaroids in the background. One thing I like about this skin is that the image is large; as you will see with other skins, sometimes the images are really tiny.
Speaking of large, here’s another chunky skin. It’s called AeroTunes, and the variant shown is called “Hashonboat.” By the way, skins usually come with all of the fonts that they require. If a required font isn’t installed on your system, CD Art Display will give you a chance to install it before trying to use the skin.
Now, let’s check out couple of really slim skins. The first one is called RooLa, and it’s actually a text-only skin; there’s no CD Art! However, it’s a beautiful, thin strip of song information that lets you easily rate the track, go back, skip forward, play/pause, and it has a nice scrolling animation that toggles between the song title and the album. It’s perfect as a minimalist interface for your music player.
Another skinny skin (get it?) is Subject Matter. Here, the image can be a bit misleading; the skin comes with either different variants, covering widths from 1024 pixels all the way to 1920 pixels. It is meant to take up the full width of your desktop, and it features beautiful, big typography and an integrated progress bar. Out of all the skins I tested, this one definitely makes the best use of large typography. It’s very elegant.
Rounding out our “slim skins” is Abandon Slim. It uses a sort of a neat “radial wipe-out” transition to switch between cover images, and it has some clearly defined lines. The third lines scrolls album name, track bitrate, release date, and someo ther song data.
I’m a die-hard Microsoft fanboy, but I hear Adium for the Mac is a great instant messaging program. Pure Adium for CD Art Display attempts to borrow some of its good looks, and I think it does it quite well. Too bad the cover is so small, though.
Clearly aimed at Foobar fans, FoobarSutra Origin features a tiny, tiny, tiny (!) cover art image, but it has a dedicated button for bringing your player interface to the top and some groovy cover transitions.
With no less than 31 different variants, Toaster Aero wins the “insanely customizable” award for this roundup. At its core, this is a simple skin with a good-sized cover image and a separate panel that shows track information and provides some controls. Thanks to its enormous number of variants, though, you can easily go for dark text, choose a larger or smaller window, put the cover image on the right, or easily customize it in any number of other ways. It’s very, very versatile.
Last but not least is a retro-tastic skin that goes by the name of YouCAD. It’s basically a blown-up version of an icon that is instantly recognizable to iPhone users. It’s a large skin with very graceful typography, and it features its own separate, draggable lyrics panel.
Do you know of any other cool skins? Let me know in the comments, and feel free to include a link or two!
[Note: After playing around with so many skins, I found out that the fonts on Firefox were wonky for some reason -- some places were unreadable. Removing Helvetica resolved the problem.]
Nine cool CD Art Display skins to showcase your music originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Windows Media Player – Winamp – Microsoft – ITunes – Foobar2000
View full post on Download Squad
Apple has finally unveiled iTunes 10, and it comes with Ping, a built-in social network for music. Based on Steve Jobs’ demo, Ping looks just like a Facebook/Twitter hybrid. The social graph connects the same way Twitter’s does — with a “follow” system, and a single on-or-off privacy setting — but the activity stream is very reminiscent of Facebook. Posting photos and comments and “liking” things are all part of the package. 
Born in 2008, 
From the putting-a-smile-on-your-newly-awoken-face department…