You may have noticed that I have started adding CAD (CD Art Display) skins in with my guikits and that I am also creating some for single releases.

I used to do this with Avetunes but in all honesty, it was just to add something extra to a pack or I would create one to submit between submitting guikits. Those Avetunes days are now long gone for me. Anyone who has skinned something like avetunes, styler toolbar, miranda etc know that the worst part of it is actually the coding. Many find an existing skin, change the images to fit around the existing code or actually alter some of the mind numbing code. You would need
to keep restarting the program just to see if the code change was ok. For a skinner, well for me, that sucks some serious a$$ and can put me off creating new skins.

I had seen a good few people using CAD and just thought to myself that it was another avetunes type of player with the a$$ sucking coding to follow if I ever wanted to skin it. So I downloaded it, installed it, tried and it and this is why it's bye bye avetunes.

So what is CD Art Display?

CD ART Display (CAD) used to be known as Winamp CD Case. It is a free (free is always awesome ) program that shows the current song cover in a completely skinnable display and interface. The most current version, CD Art Display 2.0 Beta 4 was released in February but was updated just last month and is available for all users.

CAD 1.0's main features were:

Skinnable
High quality graphics
PNG transparency support
Reads cover from players database, local folder or ID3v2 tag
Download cover from Amazon.com via built in tool
Cover as system tray icon
Fancy ratings
Progress bar styles
Mirror effect
Cover rotation
A lot of text options (font, color, outline, shadow etc.)
Lyrics (read, search and submit thanks to LYRDB.com)
Hotkeys (including rating ones)
Free! No spyware or adware!

and now CAD 2.0b4 has been bombarded with huge improvements and features. There is far too many to list here so just check out this [link] and you will see for yourself just how much has been changed.

CD Art Display fully works with AlbumPlayer, Helium Music Manager, iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player, MediaMonkey and partially supports qmp, MP3Toys, musikCube and foobar2000 (Winamp API Emulator plugin).

Here is just a tiny example of what skins are available and why it will be getting it's own gallery

So why am I telling you guys all of this?

3 reasons

1. Because I can

2. Because it's just an awesome little program that anyone can appreciate.

but the main reason is because this is a skinners dream. It is the perfect solution for anyone wanting to get into skinning. It's just so straight forward to do but it is the editing and coding of it that is it's asset. Open the skin editor and you are presented with a simple and easy to understand interface. All the code can be altered from here by a series of clicks and the best part is that it shows you the changes you make as you go. No more typing in code and restarting to see the effects. It's all realtime changes.

If only more applications used this coding method, I think the community would grow larger than it already is because more people would try their hand at skinning.

You can download CAD Version 1.0 here [link] and then upgrade to CAD version 2.0 Beta 4 here [link]



To my watchers. This is not the newsletter I said to look out for. That one is too follow