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.

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.

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

Today we’re releasing the first phase of what will soon become FoxyTunes 3.0. In this first release we’re introducing a cool new feature called “Signatunes“.

Signatunes allows signing your email messages and blog posts with your currently playing music. Why would you want to do that? Letting your friends know what you were listening to while writing the message is a great way to tell them about your mood, or introduce them to one of your favorite songs. The added music signature is more just a song title – it links to FoxyTunes Planet where your friends can listen to music and learn all there is to know about your favorite artists and songs.

So, how does Signatunes work? FoxyTunes adds a special icon to web mail sites, Blogging services and social networks, such as Facebook, MySpace, Gmail, Yahoo mail, Wordpress and many others. This allows you to add a music signature to your message with a click. There is also an ‘auto-insert’ mode, which allows you to automatically add a Signatune to every message you compose. If you already have a preset signature – don’t worry, Signatune doesn’t replace your existing signature – it’s added to the end of the message following the message body and any existing signatures.

Initially, the following services are supported:

Facebook Notes, Mail	MySpace Blogs
WordPress	Yahoo! Mail
AOL Mail	Hotmail
Gmail	Horde Webmail
SquirrelMail

In the future, we are planning to add Signatunes to many more sites, Blogging and webmail services, forums and so on.

Signatunes is available in the latest version of FoxyTunes for Firefox – check it out and let us know what you think!

Today we’re releasing a cool new Twitter and FoxyTunes integration service - we call it “FoxyTunes Twitter DJ“.

FoxyTunes DJ is a new Twitter channel with music recommendations from a selected group of “FoxyTunes DJs”. Our first featured DJs are:

• Fred Wilson (A VC, Union Square Ventures)
• Chris Messina (Co-founder, Citizen Agency) - we’d also like to thank Chris for his feedback and advice with this new service
• Ouriel Ohayon (Editor, TechCrunch France; General Manager LightSpeed Gemini Internet Lab)
• Jason Herskowitz (Director - Music Products, AOL)

Also, the new service allows all Twitter users to share their favorite songs with the community. Just add FoxyTunesDJ as your Twitter friend, wait for a few moments until FoxyTunesDJ adds you back and use TwittyTunes to send your music recommendations to FoxyTunesDJ by prefixing it with “@FoxyTunesDJ”. All community recommendations will appear on this FoxyTunes Planet page.

One last thing - in order to make posting to FoxyTunesDJ easier - we added a new drop down option to the latest version of TwittyTunes - get it here!

So, you’re listening to some tunes and you suddenly feel the urge to let all your friends know about the great song that just started playing…

TwittyTunes to the rescue! It’s our latest Firefox extension that integrates between FoxyTunes and Twitter, allowing one click posting of music currently playing in any one of supported media players to your Twitter profile.

And that’s not all - TwittyTunes posts more than just the song title - your friends will see a link to Foxytunes Planet where the song you were listening to comes to life - with tons of info about the artist, photos, song videos and much more!

As a bonus, TwittyTunes allows posting the current website you’re browsing, video you’re watching and so on. It will even work without FoxyTunes if you’re only after posting websites and general Twitter updates.

Grab TwittyTunes here and let us know what you think!

Also, you can go to TwittyTunes Twitter page and add us as your friend to be the first ones to get all the latest updates and announcements.

Today, after running for a while in a private beta, we are finally opening the first beta of FoxyTunes Planet to the public!

First, we wanted to thank everyone for the amazing feedback you sent us during the private beta.

So, what’s FoxyTunes Planet and why would you want to use it?

FoxyTunes Planet is a Universal Personalized Music Aggregator. Is this obscure enough? Then, read on…

Everything’s in one place

Each page on FoxyTunes Planet aggregates music information and rich media from all around the Web and allows you to instantly access all the great things that are out there – be it artist radio stations, recommendation services, videos, photos, reviews and so on.

Music related content should be abundant - why limit yourself to only one or two music sites, when there is an entire Internet out there. FoxyTunes Planet brings the entire Web of Music to your fingertips!

You choose

FoxyTunes Planet is personalizable - you are free to decide what you see and how you see it. Each piece of content, such as videos on YouTube or radio stations on Last.fm is presented in a “widget” – a little panel that allows you to quickly browse through the content. You can add, remove, reorder and configure the widgets any way you like – to create your own unique view on the world of music. FoxyTunes Planet already has many cool widgets and the list will be growing soon.

Wherever you are - FoxyTunes Planet is only a click away

FoxyTunes lets you discover the world of music related to what you are listening to with one click - right in your browser. It supports a huge number of media players and music services - it doesn’t matter whether you are listening to music with iTunes, Pandora or Winamp – the tiny FoxyTunes browser add-on instantly connects you to the Planet - your universal music dashboard.

Universal music link

Did you ever recommend music to a friend? Do you send a link to artist’s video? A Wikipedia page? Maybe a link to artist’s official website? Or a link to artist’s page in your favorite music service?

The problem is that video sites often don’t have artist bios, music information sites sometimes don’t have videos and music service links only work if your friends are using the same music services as you are.

Because FoxyTunes Planet pages have everything - videos, bios, photos, music services and much more, a single link to FoxyTunes Planet artist page allows your friends to discover all there is to discover about an artist. And, because the Planet is personalized, your friends will see the artists you send them through their own favorite sites and services.

http://foxytunes.com/artist/red_hot_chili_peppers

Enhance, don’t replace

Just as with our universal browser add-on, our goal is to support and promote great music products and services that our users enjoy.
FoxyTunes doesn’t replace your favorite services - it enhances them, brings them closer to you and allows using many of them together.

This is just the beginning

Although we think that FoxyTunes Planet is already a cool place for music lovers, this is really just a preview of what’s to come.

Stay tuned for more Foxyness coming soon!