Rainmeter 2.1 Released

18 September, 2011

The Rainmeter team couldn’t be more pleased to announce the release of Rainmeter 2.1. Over seven months have passed since we made the big jump to version 2.0 - which has been downloaded over 1.3 million times since its release in February - making this one of the longest development cycles in Rainmeter’s history. But Rainmeter hasn’t stopped growing. Our latest achievement comes alongside a brand-new redesigned website, and there’s a lot to be excited about:

• We’ve added our single most-requested feature: the NowPlaying plugin, which allows a single Rainmeter skin to interact with a huge range of popular media players by changing only a single setting. AIMP, Foobar2000, iTunes, MediaMonkey, MusicBee, Winamp, VLC Media Player, and Windows Media Player are all fully supported, along with any other players that are compatible with CD Art Display. Also, Last.fm, Media Player Classic, OpenPandora, Spotify, TTPlayer and Zune are partially supported. The plugin not only allows the display of track, artist and album information and basic player controls, but also makes it possible to change the track position, toggle shuffle and repeat settings, and even rate your music directly from Rainmeter.

• Past versions included a small fleet of popular addons that made it easier to manage and customize your skins: RainBrowser, RainThemes, RainBackup, and Rainstaller. We are now in the process of baking those features directly into Rainmeter, starting with the Rainmeter Manager. Just click on the Rainmeter icon in your Windows tray, and you’ll have your whole library at your fingertips. Load new skins, change settings on the fly, and save and restore your “theme” arrangements - all from the same elegant tabbed interface.
• While Rainmeter was already incredibly light on system resources, you asked us to make it even lighter - and we answered the challenge. Rainmeter’s performance has been improved in countless areas, including significantly faster launch times and image caching for graphics-heavy skins. Rainmeter 2.1 also plays better with Windows 7 than ever before. Skins can take advantage of Aero blur, and Rainmeter now keeps track of your network usage independently, instead of by theme.

• And for you Rainmeter skin authors looking for new development features, we have a whole lot of new toys for you. We’ve added commands to change any meter’s settings and appearance without using styles or variables, added escape variables and “magic” quotes to make bang commands more powerful, and made improvements to the Lua script measure, which lets you break free of Rainmeter’s simple format and jump into a complex multi-line script whenever you need to. Substitution now allows regular expressions for all measures. The totally-overhauled About console gives you finer control over notification, debug and error logs. And we’ve cleaned up the code, shortening many commands, and making others more consistent and intuitive for beginners to learn.

A full history of changes to Rainmeter 2.1 can be found at: What's New in Rainmeter 2.1.
As always, Rainmeter 2.1 is fully backwards compatible with all existing skins, and you need only install it right over top of your current Rainmeter 2.0 or earlier setup. None of your settings or hard work will be lost.
The Rainmeter community is growing by the day, and with the brave new world of Windows 8 on the horizon, it looks like there’s no end in sight! We invite you to partake in our latest milestone release - and many more to come.