The Firefox Addon Reviews – FoxyTunes

We spend so much time in our browsers nowadays, that slowly more and more functionality is being added to them. Foxytunes is a great extension to control your music from your browser. I've been using it since it came out years ago. Its grown to support all major music players, including: iTunes, Winamp, foobar, rhapsody online, real player, xbox media center, last.fm, musicmatch, sonique, quintessential, coolplayer... just to name a few. In the unlikely case that your music player is not supported, it also has an option to use a generic player.

At a quick glance, this add-on is great because it...

• Supports major browsers, not just Firefox
• Supports most major music players (itunes, winamp, coolplayer etc)
• Works on Windows, Linux and Mac
• Saves you time
• Prevents clutter

Head on over to FoxyTunes homepage to get started!Installing it is as easy as any other Firefox Extension, the only thing to note is that you'll need to add FoxyTunes' website to the Allowed Sites list for Firefox. This is really easy to do. Simply, click on Get FoxyTunes link. Firefox will show an alert telling you that it prevented this software from installing. Click on "Edit Options" you will be taken to the Allowed Sites - Add-ons Installation list.

Simply, verify that the address to be added is www.foxytunes.com and then click on Allow. It should look like this:

After this, click on the Get FoxyTunes link again and the standard Firefox software installation process will commence. Install, restart firefox and FoxyTunes will be ready to go.

Once you restart Firefox, you will be taken to the FoxyTunes welcome page. This is nice because it shows you new features and how to use the plugin. This page will only be displayed once after each installation or update so if you loose it, this is the link (http://www.foxytunes.com/welcome/) but FoxyTunes is really easy to use so you should not need to revisit theis page. Notice the huge orange arrow pointing at the location of the FoxyTunes controls, and get started.

Once installed, you'll see that this is a really mature add-on. It has all the nice features you've come to expect from well written software. Mouse over each of the buttons to see what they do. Your main button for now will be the music symbol icon. This is FoxyTunes main menu and you can access all settings and options through it. Click on the button, then click on Player and select your preferred player from the list. If you are currently playing music, the status bar will refresh automatically and immediately to show you the current song playing. If your player isn't running, simply click the play button and this will launch it and begin playing whatever was playing the last time you used it. I think this works for all players but I know for a fact that it works for Winamp because that is what I use.

Besides the obvious and main purpose of this add-on, that is to control your music player (play, next song, previous song, volume etc) this add-on has a lot of cool extra features. Using the search button, you can access web searches for the song/artist/album currently playing. The one i use the most is the lyrics search. It takes you to search results for that song so you can see the lyrics quickly. No more futzing around lyrics365.com, or other sites. You can also use built-in features to look up an artist's Wikipedia page. The iTunes store is also just a click away, allowing you to shop for new related songs easily.

This add-on is definitely a must have for me; if you listen to music on your computer you should give this a try. It will save you time and keep you from minimizing your browser just so you can find your player and skip to the next song, or repeat, or pause or change the volume.