Introduction

Overview

CoverArt is a plugin for Winamp which allows to display in its own skinned window the cover art of the current playing song.

What you get with Cover Art

I wrote it in 2003 for Winamp 2.90, and as a matter of fact this was the first third-party plug-in to make use of the new APIs! It stills work with no modification under the Winamp 5.xx serie, including the new free-forms skins.

Features

CoverArt is strongly linked to the way I handle my music collection. Thus, there are no optional settings or customisations:
 Basically it monitores Winamp activity to detect song changes.
 On a song change, it automatically look for a picture file in the very same directory the song lives.
 Then, it paints in its own window the found picture Here it is: it does no more, no less!

Integration

The CoverArt plug-in inserts a new entry in the Winamp main menu. You’ll find a “Cover Art” menu item amongst the “main window”, “playlist editor”, “video window”,... to show or hide the Cover Art window.

Supported image formats

Because Windows standard libraries are limited to BMP format, at least on Windows versions prior to XP, Cover Art embeds its own pictures decoders.

Current supported image formats are:
 BMP
 GIF
 JPEG
 JPEG2000
 PNG

Future

Although the current version is very stable, it is in a very preliminar state. Here is the current roadmap:
 make use of the new Winamp 5 callbacks
 offer options about picture resizing policies
 tags (such as ID3v2) read/write support
 Integration of Amazon Web services to automatically look up for CoverArt
 Integration of MusicBrainz service
 provide an API for third-party developers
 preference panel, contextual menu and so on...

Some of this features such as PNG and Jpeg encoders, resizing things, preferences or internationalisation are already implemented but desactivated in the current release (hardcoded things and so on).

How it is made

Cover Art is written in plain ANSI C, using the Winamp SDK and Win32 API. It has no extra dependencies!