It’s my pleasure to announce that a preview version of FoxyTunes 2.0 is finally here. We’ve been working very hard on this new version, and I hope you’ll be as excited about it as we are!

Get the new FoxyTunes 2.0 preview version

Our goal with FoxyTunes 2.0 is to remove the boundaries between your favorite media players and the Web!

With FoxyTunes 2.0:

• You can listen to music with your media players and see what the Web has to say about what’s playing – lyrics, images, videos, album covers, bios and more – with a single click and without ever leaving your browser!
• You can surf the Web and stream the great music you find – mp3s, podcasts and more, directly to your favorite media players.

You don’t have to install a new media player or a special browser to do all that. FoxyTunes allows you to explore the Web of Music with your favorite media players within your favorite browser.

Our approach with FoxyTunes is:

• Don’t replace, enhance – support the things you already have and love
• Be tiny and unobtrusive – FoxyTunes is there to complement

FoxyTunes 2.0 has many new features, too many to fit into a single post. The main new features are:

1. Web searches – find lyrics, artist images, videos, bios and more, while listening to music with FoxyTunes
2. Info Box – your music “dashboard”. Shows song info, album art, recent history and more…
3. Podcasts and feeds – quickly preview any podcast, stream any or all episodes to your player, and, if you like what you hear, subscribe
4. Web media – find music on the Web pages you visit, and stream it to your media player with a click
5. FoxyTunes Mini – the only music desktop widget with its own tabbed browser!

We created a short screencast demonstrating the new FoxyTunes features – check it out:

This is only the beginning – we are working on great new stuff that will be announced soon…

Surely, you’ve heard about Flock – the social Firefox-based web browser that has seamless integration with Web services such as Flickr and del.icio.us, a built-in RSS reader, Blog editor and several additional useful features.

The first Flock Beta version is now public. I think that Flock has matured a great deal since its first previews releases – you might want to check it out.

Our mission is to make FoxyTunes truly universal – support as many media players as possible and bring FoxyTunes to your favorite applications – Firefox, Thunderbird and more…

That’s why it’s my pleasure to announce that the latest FoxyTunes beta (1.3.7) officially supports Flock. So, as always, the choice is yours!

Get the latest FoxyTunes 1.3.7

With Flock Beta released and the new Firefox just around the corner, FoxyTunes too has a major new version coming very soon.

Can you imagine your favorite media player browsing the Web and your browser singing a tune? Stay tuned for FoxyTunes 2.0

Xbox Media Center is a very popular open source media player for the Xbox™.

Our latest beta, 1.3.5, adds FoxyTunes support for Xbox Media Center (XBMC)!

As always, you can get the latest beta from here.

This version has all the regular FoxyTunes goodies. There are a couple of bonuses – “Show Player” will open a new tab with your XBMC Web interface. “Play File” allows you to enter a URL and stream any media directly to your XBMC. Stay tuned for our next releases (coming soon!) – they’ll take these and other goodies to a completely new level!

What I really love in adding new features and players to FoxyTunes is all the feedback we immediately receive from the community. It’s great to see how many people love FoxyTunes and use it every day. And knowing that our work is appreciated by a huge community is enough to keep me working days and nights on FoxyTunes!

Some history – about a month ago, LiquidIce wrote and offered to help in adding support for Xbox Media Center to FoxyTunes. He sent me the XBMC API documentation along with useful examples and tips. After the first version of the controller was ready, I actually worked on LiquidIce’s Xbox from remote to check it out and do some initial debugging

So, big thanks to LiquidIce for helping make this happen!

(*) Please make sure you read the installation notes on the download page. There are still a couple of known issues (for example, the volume control is reported to be a bit buggy) – we’ll work on these during the next couple of days to get them solved.

By popular demand, our latest beta (1.3.5) supports the PandoraFM mashup.

Users told us that they like using FoxyTunes with Pandora, but many of them are listening to Pandora through the PandoraFM mashup, and they were missing the FoxyTunes goodies when they did.

So, your wish is our command! Grab the latest beta and enjoy!

Pandora and Last.fm are the most popular music discovery services out there. While there are Last.fm and Pandora enthusiasts that argue that one service is substantially better than the other, many of us music lovers find that both services are great for discovering new music and are using both Pandora and Last.fm on a daily basis.

I believe that it should be all about the music – I don’t want to choose between Pandora and Last.fm, I don’t want to choose between iTunes and Winamp. I love them all and find that each one has its own advantages. I’d like to think that FoxyTunes reflects this point of view

We got a cool new Intel Mac Mini, and I immediately fell in love with it! It’s amazing how something so tiny and elegant can be so powerful and convenient. I’d like to think that our users like FoxyTunes for the same reasons

The first thing we did with our new Mac Mini is to add Intel Mac support to FoxyTunes.

We didn’t forget our Linux users either – our new version better supports the newer Linux distributions, such as Fedora Core 5.

The latest version (1.3.1) contains these and additional fixes and improvements, along with partial Pandora support. You can get the new version here.

As always, we’d really appreciate your feedback!

Good news, following my previous post, we fixed a few issues and now FoxyTunes can again show what’s playing in your Pandora

You can get the latest FoxyTunes version from here.

First, if you haven’t heard about Pandora yet, you should definitely give it a try. It’s a great way of discovering new music and I’m sure you’ll love it!

Lately we received many user requests to add Pandora support to FoxyTunes. While listening to Pandora, our users really missed the convenience of always knowing which track is playing. Also, many of them find themselves looking for the Pandora player among many open tabs or windows, when they want to skip a track or change a station.

Basically, our users wanted the same convenience that FoxyTunes provides with their other media players (Winamp, iTunes etc.).

So, we decided to support Pandora in FoxyTunes. Currently, FoxyTunes will allow you to:

1. See what’s playing on your Pandora.
2. Automatically launch the Pandora Web site and by that the embedded Pandora player, if it isn’t already open.
3. Show the Pandora Web player. This is an interesting feature. If Pandora is running in its own window – this will show that window. If Pandora is running in a tab – “show player” will raise that tab. “Hide player” will return you to the tab you were working in before hitting “Show player”.
4. Volume – you can control the volume and mute. This currently controls your system volume (on Windows, Mac and Linux).
5. Multi platform – the controller works (at least partially) on all platforms.

In future versions, we’ll try to allow pausing and skipping tracks right from FoxyTunes, controlling Pandora’s volume instead of the global one and other useful features.

A related new feature – we call it “Quick Player Switching”. It allows you to see which player is selected and switch between the most used players. The icon of the current player is displayed in the FoxyTunes main menu, along with up to three last players used (if any).

I hope you find all this as useful as we do

Get the new FoxyTunes Preview version (1.3) with Pandora support here.

[edit] Looks like Pandora have changed the way the currently playing track is displayed, so FoxyTunes is no longer able to pick that up. We’ll try to get this fixed and keep you updated. Stay tuned

[update] We fixed this – our latest preview version (1.3.1) can again show what’s playing in your Pandora

The international edition of our latest version is out – get it from here.

New translations in this version:

• Romanian by Bogdan Mardare
• Finnish by Akilles
• Frisian by moZes

Big thanks to all the translators – with your help FoxyTunes is now translated into 24 languages.