Display album art on desktop with CD Art Display (freeware)

CD Art Display is a skinnable gadget that appears on your desktop and shows the CD cover of the currently playing song. It reads cover from player’s database, local folder or ID3v2 tag and can also search for covers online if they are not found locally. The software offers a slick interface with transparency and alpha shading and playback controls to pause or skip to the next track in the playlist. Other features include lyrics display, lyrics editing, cover display in tray icon and more. CD Art Display currently supports AlbumPlayer, Helium Music Manager, iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player, MediaMonkey and partially supports foobar2000 (with Winamp API Emulator plugin), MP3Toys, qmp and musikCube.

CD Art Display is a freeware.

Download CD Art Display here

Download skins for CD Art Display here

Help With Playlists

If you don’t want to create your own playlists, the free MusicIP Mixer application analyzes your library and builds playlists for you by matching songs that have similar acoustic characteristics. Import your music (click Library > Add Songs or select Sync with iTunes), and then choose Library > Start Analysis. When the program finishes, select the song you’ll base your playlist on, and then click Mix.

To tweak the way the program builds its playlists, select File, Preferences and adjust the Mix Settings. The mixes the program created for me didn’t always make sense on screen, yet when I listened to them, they flowed nicely. If you don’t like one of its choices, just right-click it and select Replace.

Speed up file copying with TeraCopy

Free file-copying utility TeraCopy speeds up file transfers and can pause, resume and test file copy operations. With TeraCopy you can:

Copy files faster. TeraCopy uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times. Asynchronous copy speeds up file transfer between two physical hard drives.
Pause and resume file transfers. Pause copy process at any time to free up system resources and continue with a single click.
Error recovery. In case of copy error, TeraCopy will try several times and in the worse case just skips the file, not terminating the entire transfer.

You can also use TeraCopy to diff the contents of two directories by running a “Test” copy, which shows you which files exist in the destination directory as compared to the source. If you’ve ever had Windows fail at the very last minute of a multi-gigabyte file copy, TeraCopy’s for you. TeraCopy is a free download for home use for Windows.

Replace Windows Explorer with FreeCommander 2007

Windows Explorer is a reasonable tool for managing your files and documents. But it hasn’t really changed for years and, while we all wait for the new version of Explorer, this doesn’t enable us to get our work finished more efficiently and effectively within Windows Vista.

FreeCommander is a Windows Explorer replacement that will enable you to work with multiple folders more quickly.

For instance, freeCommander has the facility to open a dual-panel window, which means you can have two folders (or hard drive contents) open within both windows, and then simply drag files to and from each window.

With built-in support for different archive formats and the ability to synchronise between different folders, you can quickly compare the contents of two folders and then choose to update the destination window with only the updated or new content.

This is an excellent option when you want to remotely access and update your homepage. Open the local folder contents within one window and the remote contents in the other window pane, compare the contents then synchronise.

Download FreeCommander 2007 here 

Dig deep into your system processes with Overload Monitor

Overload Monitor is diagnostic and monitoring utility that keeps track of processes that overload machine’s CPU.

   Main features:
* performs machine’s Hardware and Software inventory;
* provides CPU, Memory, Processes, Network Traffic and Disks monitoring;
* shows Station info, running Processes, active TCP connections, Network Traffic, System and Application Events logs;
* collects Software and Licenses information;
* displays and explores Hard Disks Used space;
* automatically sends notification messages over network to specified workstations;
* generates TXT, CSV and HTM reports;

Identify those unknown songs with Tunatic

Tunatic is a little app which analyzes the music playing through your sound card

and returns the title of the song and the artist. There are a few bugs though but they are too little to over-shadow the usability of this program. (Though you can’t expect to return the information of every song you play).

When you install Tunatic, it is initially configured to take up sounds from your

microphone. That means you have to keep you mic near the speakers everytime you

want it to find the song information. But you can easily configure it to take up sounds

from any media player. Just follow the following steps:

1.  Right-click Tunatic and select Settings

2.  Click on Configure

3.  Check the box under Wave-out. Thats all.

Now Tunatic will look for information for any song you play. No mic needed.