FoxyTunes 3.0 for Firefox is finally here!

This version adds a very cool new functionality – it can turn any webpage into a playlist you can play right there on that page – without needing to launch any external media players or programs. How is this possible? With the new Yahoo! Media Player.

What’s Yahoo! Media Player?

Yahoo! Media Player is a really cool music player that lives on the web and can play music found on web pages as a playlist. The player floats ‘above’ the page content, so even if you scroll up and down the page, the player stays at the same position right in front of you.

Up until now, in order to add this player to a web page, you had to be the owner of that page. But what about sites that still haven’t added this to their pages? FoxyTunes to the resque!

Yahoo! Media Player + FoxyTunes = Play any page

The latest version of FoxyTunes enhances any page that has music on it by automatically adding the Yahoo! Media Player to that page. Then, you can conveniently play any track on that page or even the whole page as one big playlist!

Here’s an example – a few songs for you to enjoy:

• Negativland - Richard Nixon Died Today
• Tilly and The Wall - Pot Kettle Black
• Less Than Jake - Does The Lion City Still Roar?

If you have the latest FoxyTunes for Firefox installed, you’ll see a tiny ‘play’ buttons next to each song – just push them and see what happens

Also, you can already see the Yahoo! Media Player in action on many great music sites, such as Aurgasm, Soul Sides and List of the Day on Yahoo! Music Blogs.

By the way, if you would prefer that FoxyTunes didn’t add the player to webpages, you can always disable this functionality in FoxyTunes ‘configuration’ menu.

Auto Player Switching – Look Ma, No Hands!

The best thing is that once you start playing a webpage with the new Yahoo! Media Player you can instantly control it with FoxyTunes, even while surfing in other tabs or browser windows – just make sure to leave the page that’s currently playing somewhere in the background. And, if you close that page, your FoxyTunes will automatically switch back to your regular media player – be it iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp etc.

We are very excited about this new version of FoxyTunes, and hope you’ll be as excited as we are!

So, check it out here and let us know what you think!

-Alex

We are very happy to announce that the beta of FoxyTunes for IE v2.0 - our next major version is finally here.

Get FoxyTunes for IE v2.0 Beta

Here’s an overview of what’s new in FoxyTunes for IE v2.0:

Skins

You can now change the appearance of your FoxyTunes by installing a custom skin. There are already more than 11 skins available here, and we’re planning to publish a guide that will describe how anyone can easily create a custom skin for FoxyTunes.

FoxyTunes Mini

Similarly to its Firefox counterpart, FoxyTunes Mini for IE is a universal desktop widget that allows you to control any media player even when you’re not inside a browser. Similarly to its bigger brother, the Mini is customizable, collapsible and skinnable. You can launch the Mini from the FoxyTunes main menu.

Alarm clock and Sleep timer

You can now use your FoxyTunes for IE as an alarm clock - just set your media player to your favorite song, pause it, and tell FoxyTunes at what time to start playing the music. Also, you can use the sleep timer to instruct FoxyTunes to stop the playback after a specified amount of time.

Translations

FoxyTunes for IE now speaks more than 30 languages! FoxyTunes for IE shares most of the translations with FoxyTunes for Firefox - thanks to all the translators for helping localize FoxyTunes to so many languages.

So, check out this version and let us know what you think.

As you might know, Firefox 3 is just around the corner, and we did some work on FoxyTunes to make sure it’s compatible. So, check out the latest version here, and let us know if you see any issues or quirks with the latest beta of Firefox 3.

Also, the latest TwittyTunes is also compatible.

We are very excited to announce that FoxyTunes has been acquired by Yahoo!

So, what does this mean for you, our loyal user? Basically, it means that if you liked what we’ve done with FoxyTunes in the past, you’ll love what we’ll now be able to achieve being a part of Yahoo!. Read on for more details, and I hope you’ll be as excited as we are!
Why did Yahoo! acquire FoxyTunes?
We’ve been talking to the Yahoo! Music team about deepening our cooperation, and we quickly discovered that not only do they understand and appreciate what we’ve done with FoxyTunes, but they also share our vision of Universality and Openness, and are really prepared to take this vision forward and implement it on the largest scale possible! So, it was clear for everyone that an acquisition made sense, because it would allow us to really join forces and work together on our common vision.

What’s going to happen to FoxyTunes?
The FoxyTunes team will become a part of Yahoo! Music and will continue working on FoxyTunes, adding many great things to our products - you’ll see support for additional media players, integration with many additional music sites and services and much more! Our product roadmap and wishlist are quite long and very exciting, and being a part of Yahoo! will really allow us to make many of the things we’ve been planning a reality. Most importantly, Yahoo! are as committed as we are to preserving the Open spirit of FoxyTunes and embracing all the great music products and services out there.

Will this affect user privacy?
As always, your privacy is very important to us and we’ll never do anything to jeopardize it. You can see our privacy policy here.

What does this mean for FoxyTunes users and partners?
If you’re a FoxyTunes user you’ll still get the same unobtrusive but at the same time rich and universal experience you’ve come to expect from FoxyTunes. If you’re our partner, either existing or potential, rest assured that our philosophy of being open hasn’t changed - if you have a media player, music site or service, or in general if your stuff is of interest to music lovers - we’d be happy to work together! We’re planning to release more info on all the various ways of integrating and working with FoxyTunes in the near future.

We’d like to thank everyone who helped and supported us over the years - our passionate users, great partners, investors and friends - we really couldn’t make it without you. A special thanks goes to Yossi Vardi for his amazing support and for believing in us from the very beginning.

Also, check out Yahoo!’s announcement on Yahoo! Music Blog.

We are very excited to be joining the Yahoo! family and can’t wait to show you all the cool things we’re working on.

Stay Tuned!

A new FoxyTunes version is here, and it introduces more options for signing your mails and blog posts with music.

Say you’re writing an email, and would like to sign it with the song that was playing 10 minutes ago. Until now, you had to go back and play that song again in order to be able to sign with it. But what if you heard this song on an Internet radio and there’s no way to go back? The new FoxyTunes version allows you to choose any song from your recent playback history and post it as a Signatune.

Better yet, say you’re writing someone an email and want to send them a subliminal music message with your Signatune, for example:

———————-
Now playing: The Doors - Hello, I Love You

The new version allows you to insert any song you can think of as a Signatune - just open the “Post any song” dialog and enter the song name.

The latest version also adds Signatunes support for the new Gmail and Yahoo Mail versions.

So, check it out here and let us know what you think.

We’ve added a useful feature to FoxyTunes Planet - now you can search by track name, in addition to searching by artist or genre.

For example, click here to search for “All Along the Watchtower“.

As you can see, although the song was originally written by Bob Dylan, it has been since covered by many popular artists - Jimi Hendrix, U2, Grateful Dead and many others.

A new FoxyTunes Planet release is now public - it adds several nice features that will help you find more great songs by your favorite artists and share them with your friends.

The most important additions are ‘Track View’ and ‘Album and Track Explorer’. In Track View, widgets change dynamically to display content relevant to the currently selected track. Album and Track Explorer allows you to quickly navigate between the artist’s tracks.

You can see an example of the new FoxyTunes Planet features here.

Here’s a more detailed list of the new additions:

Track and Album Explorer
You can now explore each artist on FoxyTunes Planet by their albums or songs. You can sort albums or tracks by their name, popularity, release date etc.

Top albums, top tracks
The artist side bar now displays top albums and top tracks for each artist. Clicking on ‘more’ will open the corresponding album explorer or track explorer window

Track permalink
Up until now you could only share artists on FoxyTunes Planet by sending your friends a link to their page. Now, you can also link to any specific track - just look for a ‘permalink’ label or just copy the URL displayed in your browser address bar while being in Track View.

Twitter integration
In addition to being able to share artists on regular social bookmarking sites, the new release lets you share your music discoveries through Twitter as well

Share videos
Besides sharing artists, you can now share the videos you discover on FoxyTunes Planet through StubleUpon, FaceBook, Twitter and a ton of other services

We really hope you like the new additions, stay tuned for more Foxy stuff soon

As the summer draws to a close and some of us will be heading back to school, Mozilla have created a special version of Firefox for students - it’s called Firefox “Campus Edition”.

We are very excited that FoxyTunes was chosen by Mozilla to be a part of this special Firefox edition.

The Campus Edition is the latest Firefox version that comes bundled with three extensions that students might find useful, convenient and fun. The extensions included are FoxyTunes, StumbleUpon and Zotero.

Here’re a few words about each included extension:

• Zotero is a great tool for students that helps collect, manage, and cite research sources from around the Web
• StumbleUpon - is great for discovering new Web sites that match your interests - starting with fun stuff like photos or videos and all the way to more academics related things such as linguistics and zoology
• FoxyTunes - music is important part of our lives and for many students listening to music while learning increases productivity - and FoxyTunes helps you listen to music conveniently right from your browser. Listening to and discovering new music with FoxyTunes can also be great while taking a break from those long study hours.

There are tons of additional great add-ons for Firefox - extensions that can further improve your browsing experience and make it even more productive, convenient and fun.

You can get the Firefox Campus edition here.

If your schoolmates are still not using Firefox - help us spread the word and let them know about the new Campus Edition and all its cool additions!

Also, we created a nice flyer [PDF] that you can print-out and hang on your school or campus bulletin board.

Click here to get a printable PDF file

As you all know, it’s very important for us to make FoxyTunes truly universal - by supporting as many products, sites and services as possible.

So, today we’re releasing a new FoxyTunes version with many important Signatunes additions:

Thunderbird support - look for the new Signatunes button in your Thunderbird ‘compose’ window. You can now insert music signatures into your Thunderbird mails - both manual and automatic modes are supported

Forums support - you can now add a Signatune to your forum posts! Currently, FoxyTunes supports any forum that uses one of the following software:

• phpBB
• vBulletin
• Invision Power Board
• Web Wiz Forums
• SMF - Simple Machines Forum

LiveJournal support - we had to make a few tweaks, which allowed us to add LiveJournal support to Signatunes

So, check out the latest FoxyTunes version here and enjoy!

VLC is a very popular open source media player. We’ve been getting quite a lot of requests to support it in FoxyTunes, and today we’re releasing a new FoxyTunes version that supports VLC on Windows and Linux.

Before using FoxyTunes with VLC, you’ll need to set-up a few things - just follow the instructions you’ll see when first selecting VLC as a player in FoxyTunes.

So, check the latest FoxyTunes with VLC support and let us know what you think