How in the Tech

Bring keyboard shortcuts to iTunes with CD Art Display

By Adam Myers ⋅ August 4, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Apple, Multimedia, Shortcuts

Reluctantly, I’m a card carrying member of the iTunes User Group. iTunes is an example of a piece of software that works just well enough that you don’t actively go out looking for an alternative. Very few would argue that iTunes is the best music library manager available yet; some would go as far to say it’s one of the worst. As an iPhone user, I feel more or less tied to iTunes as I’m sure many others do. While iTunes is not the only media player that can sync with your iPhone or iPod, the entire experience isn’t horrible enough for me to seek an alternative. Sure, iTunes is horribly slow and bloated but at the end of the day, it just works and sometimes that’s just enough to keep users locked in.

One of the lacking features of iTunes is it’s support of global keyboard shortcuts, simply it doesn’t have any. If I wanted to pause the playback of a tune I generally have two options: use the mini-player so that I have quick  access to pause/play or restore the iTunes application window by clicking on it’s icon in the tray. That’s borderline unacceptable, but still not taking me to the tipping point in my iTunes usage.

CD Art Display, a free Windows application, is designed to work with your media player and display album cover art of the currently playing song on your desktop, like a widget if you will. In addition to album art, you also get the title, artist, album, and basic playback controls. Here’s where it becomes compelling for me. The playback controls can be bounded to keyboard shortcuts and provide some functionality lacking in native iTunes. You are even able to rate songs right from the desktop, again by keyboard shortcuts if you wanted. CD Art Display is not limited to iTunes; it supports WinAmp, Foobar, and Windows Media Player too. Lastly, if the track contains no album art you may use the embedded browser to search for artwork.

CD Art Display takes about 5MB of system memory which is a small price to pay for all the additional functionality it provides.