CD Art Display is a very cool application and I believe the guys who love to pimp their desktop would already have enough know-how about this nifty application. It is actually a light weight software which lets you control your music. What makes it quite a winner is that it is fully customizable and there are free skins available for download. It displays the current playing song in a pretty manner.


Currently you need to go to Windows Media Player, Foobar, Winamp or iTunes or whatever media player you are using to shuffle the music, forward or to even see the Album Cover Art. The thing is that you don’t to see/maximize the whole of media player when you can do the same function with CD Art Display (CAD). When you open up the media player, unnecessary information take up all the desktop screen while CAD is more fun and adds style to the desktop. One of the best thing about CAD is that it can also retrieve CD Album Art from Amazon which will bring some sanity in your library music which doesn’t have album art. Songs without album art do look like orphans to me. Let’s start with CD Art Display.

How to use/install CD Art Display?

1. Download the CD Art Display 2.0 Beta Setup File.

2. After downloading you need to run the setup. Double Click on the CAD setup file to start its installation.

If you want to install CD Art Display in other hard disk then browse to the location otherwise just press next.

This should complete installation and in case you find some other step then just click ‘Next’ until the end of installation. It might ask for plugins of media player which can be done after installation as well. So, no worries.

3. Once the installation of CD Art Display is done then you can configure the media players you want to associate with CD Art Display. You can do so by following these steps.

Run CD Art Display> Press Right Click on the CD Art Display icon in the taskbar> Click ‘Options’

Clicking on ‘Option’ will open up the above pictured window. Now you have to select the player you want to associate with CD Art Display. I have used iTunes so I can give the location of iTunes.exe file by clicking on ‘Open’ categorized under “Player Location.” You can leave other things as it is. Just don’t forget to press “Save” after you are done with associating media player.

Your media player is now ready to roll with CAD.

4. You might also want to configure the skin or theme of CD Art Display so that you can change its look as per the wallpaper.

There is not as much variety found in CD Art Display Themes as it is in Windows XP Themes but the ones that are available are reason enough to try different skins. You can find some of the CAD skins at DeviantArt and discover others by doing simple Google Search.

All you need to do to use a theme is download the theme and then copying the downloaded theme file in the ‘Skins’ folder under the CD Art Display folder where it is installed. You must take care of the fact that the themes you will download will be compressed and thus you need to unzip or uncompress the file before copying the themes file in the Skins folder of CD Art Display.

I hope tutorial helped you to make your desktop look better. We would love to hear how you customized your desktop and we won’t hesitate to showcase some of the customizations of our viewers on JustSkins. Leave a comment to let us know.