iTunes Visualizer: Cover Version

Cover Version

A Visualizer for iTunes.

The plug-in displays the album cover artwork of the currently playing audio track.

Lyrics of the track are displayed on top of the album cover artwork.

Artist name and track title are displayed bottom-aligned.


Mac OS X		Windows

System Requirements:

“Cover Version” is available for Mac OS X and Windows.

The Mac OS X version is built for Mac OS X 10.3.9 and above.
The Windows version runs on Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

iTunes Version 5.0 (or greater) is required.

How to install:

Mac OS X: Put the file CoverVersion into the folder "Library/iTunes/iTunes Plug-ins/" of your home directory.
Windows: Put the file CoverVersion.dll inside a directory called "Plug-Ins". This directory must be next to the iTunes.exe. If the directory does not exist it may be necessary to create it.

After launching iTunes again, the “Cover Version” visualizer can be activated with the “View” > “Visualizer” menu.

How to customize:

Options of the visualizer can be set by opening the configuration window at “View” > “Visualizer” > “Options...”.

Cover:	The album artwork can be animated as a flapping flag, as a rotating cuboid, as a kaleidoscope or with Vertigo effect.
Track:	The font that displays track artist and title can be changed.
Lyrics:	The text of the lyrics can be displayed centered or left-aligned. The color of the font that displays the lyrics can be adjusted.
Display:	The screen resolution of full-screen display can be changed. Normally the visualizer tries to use the maximum available resolution. A lower resolution can be chosen explicitly in case the refresh rate of the maximum resolution is not satisfactory. The “Default” entry will let iTunes switch the display resolution to its default value for full-screen display. Note that iTunes may use a low resolution (640x480 or 800x600) when using its default full-screen resolution.

Preferences:

Mac OS X: “Cover Version” stores its preferences in the file "de.imagomat.coverversion.plist". The file is located inside your preferences folder of your home directory ("~/Library/Preferences/").
Windows: “Cover Version” stores its preferences in the file "Preferences.txt". The file is located inside the "\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data\Imagomat\CoverVersion\" directory of your system volume. To see and access the file you may have to turn on “Show hidden files and folders” (View settings of “Windows Explorer”’s Folder Options).
If you have problems with “Cover Version”’s preferences you can always delete the preference file. “Cover Version” will use its default preferences if it does not find a preference file.

Please notice:

“Cover Version” does not fetch any audio meta data over the internet. Neither album cover artwork is fetched nor lyrics are added automatically.
“Cover Version” displays artwork and lyrics as they are embedded within the iTunes audio track.
You can check to see if the current audio track has embedded album cover artwork by clicking the button with the symbol . Lyrics can be edited with the information of the audio track.

Techniques:

“Cover Version” uses OpenGL for rendering the image data of the album artwork. The image data is accessed by calling iTunes’ API for visual plug-ins. Due to a limitation of the API only one cover is accessible.
The track title is also rendered with OpenGL calls. The glyphs are Unicode-savvy. The font shape is generated with Windows and Mac OS system specific functions. The bitmap then is transferred into OpenGL texture memory.

Cover Flow:

With iTunes 7 Apple introduced a new way to browse audio collections called “Cover Flow”. Since “Cover Flow” also uses advanced graphics systems and techniques, resource claims may conflict between the OpenGL based “Cover Version” visualizer and the built-in browse mode “Cover Flow”. If the workload of the system gets too high, performance may improve when switching back to list view before turning on the visualizer.

License and Availability:

“Cover Version” is freeware.
The core engine of “Cover Version” is published as an open source project called “VizKit”. “VizKit” can be accessed at sourceforge and here.

Disclaimer:

This software is provided 'as-is', without any expressed or implied warranty. In no event will the author be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this software.

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