One of the most used Firefox extensions has to be FoxyTunes. It is designed to control a large range of media players right from your browser, and it is compatible with both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Just when you thought the best couldn’t get better…
They are currently testing FoxyTunes Planet which is a music aggregation service. They have a nice search engine (pictured above) that will let you search for artists or you can browse for them by genre. Once you find the artist/group you’re looking for it will take you to a customizable page featuring videos, photos, news, bios, and much more.
They also offer a version of the FoxyTunes add-on/extension that works seamlessly with FoxyTunes Planet. While you’re playing a song all you have to do is click on the “planet” icon in the Status Bar to have it retrieve that artist’s page:
As you can see from the screenshot above a wealth of information is presented to you in just seconds…and the best thing is that you can customize how much stuff is shown. One of the planned features is to let users add widgets that aren’t already pre-designed, but until that happens you’ll be limited to these:
- Amazon.com
- Last FM
- Flickr
- iTunes Music Store
- eMusic
- Hype Machine
- Rhapsody
- Pandora
- YouTube
- Yahoo! Images
- Yahoo! Music
So…one thing that is important for you to know is that the service is currently in a private Beta and you’ll have to request an invite to get in. “Jack of all Trades” is the one who sent me information on this and he told me that I should request an invite myself…so I did. The only thing that he said the service lacks is a widget to retrieve the lyrics for a particular song, and I’m sure that will get added very soon because a lot of people would love to have that.
Here is some more information on the FoxyTunes Planet:
Frequently Asked Questions
FoxyTunes Planet announcement
i forgot one thing, in foxytunes 2, there is an option to search for lyrics (from the extension). but it never worked well cause it used google and ask and such.
but all lyrics sites, probably don’t have api. so it means more work for foxytunes ppl. hopefully they will manage.
and btw, i think its the first fx extension that turn out 2 b a service. now that is cool and show what the power of open source and extensions can do.
I’m not sure what you mean by that. There are quite a few other extensions that interact with websites, like Diigo and Del.icio.us, so I’m not sure that I follow what you meant by it turning out to be a service?
first i thought, i should get some sleep, since u were right about diigo and such.
but then i remembered – foxytunes was first “just” an extension for firefox. there was no site, not even option to search with it by clicking on something that opens google.
now, u can also search from it, and have the mashup site for more info.
diigo and such, were either first a web service, which developed an extension, or a service which was originally designed to be both.
hope it makes more sense now, and that i am also right about it. since i still haven’t gotten any sleep
That makes much more sense…kinda like what came first: the chicken or the egg. In this case the extension came first before the services, and most of the time it is the service that comes first then the extension follows later.
Thanks for the clarification.
Well, FoxyTunes does have a lyrics widget. The lyrics are taken from [lyricwiki.org]