January 02, 2008
Best Free Album Art Desktop Display for iTunes Windows
CD Art Display works alongside your Windows music player, neatly displaying the current track's cover art in a stylish floating window on the desktop. It also sports playback controls and the ability to search for missing cover art and lyrics. Several viewer display options are available - all with nice reflection effects. In addition, user-created skins can be downloaded and created.
The display window can be moved anywhere on the desktop and can be set to float above all other windows. Volume is controlled with your mouse's scrollbar (when you hover over the cover). There is also a nice dissolve transition when the album art changes. Double click to open the song in your media player.
Pull up the lyrics window and CD Art Display will search for and display song lyrics, saving them to a folder on your hard drive. You can also easily search for missing album art though Amazon, Google and Discogs, but you must manually get the cover image from your browser to the program.
ADD MISSING COVER ART WITH CD ART DISPLAY
In the diagram I'm using albumart.org (read earlier post) to search for cover art. Simply drag the chosen image from browser window to desktop, then from desktop onto the display. iTunes also gets updated, so you can delete the file you just dragged to the desktop. Unfortunately the cover art does not get embedded in the actual song files.... but that's a future post.
The program works with many popular music players - AlbumPlayer, Helium Music Manager, iTunes, Winamp (not Winamp lite), Windows Media Player, MediaMonkey, foobar2000 (with Winamp API Emulator plugin), MP3Toys, QMP and musikCube.
I think this is the best Windows iTunes display companion mainly because of how the 2 transparently work together: Rate a song or add missing album art in one program, the other reflects the change automatically. That helps to keep your iTunes music library organized and complete. It's also free, simple, looks pretty slick, works with many popular players, and it's skinnable for future display freshness.
One wish for v2 is some overall size control. I'd like to make the covers bigger when I'm working on another computer.
PLAYER COMPATIBILITY
CD Art Display is for Windows XP/Vista and requires VB6 Runtimes. Version 2.0 is in limited beta (at the time of this writing).
Some info sourced from FreewareGenius
