How To Turn Your Browser Into A Music Player

The ways you can listen to music have changed dramatically over last few years. With the introduction of digital music, advent of iPods and mobiles geared with music players, there are several options available for listening to music. Now you are offered with another exciting and interesting option of playing music online via your browser.

By turning your browser into a music player you can afford to abandon or reduce the number of digital music files. Let us have a quick look at how to turn your browser to a music player.

How To Turn Your Browser Into A Music Player

Select A Service

Start by selecting a service that allows listening to online music via browser. There are free as well as paid services that you can avail. In addition to thousand of online radio stations you can explore services from Pandora (restricted to US) or Rdio (limited service) as free options for listening to online music. While free usage of these services is attractive, there may be problems like commercial interruptions and usage restrictions.  Usually, you don’t have the option of picking your favorite tracks.

Paid services that offer option of  listening to online music through browser allow selection of your own tracks. They charge a monthly fee but you are not bothered by commercial interruptions. Paid services like Rhapsody and Zune may great for avid music fans but not all are open to idea of paying to listening music online. Some of these paid services may allow you to keep one or two albums per month but have restrictions regarding access to library.

Cloud services are also favored by many music lovers for listening to online music via browser. You can upload your favorite music albums to a cloud service like Amazon’s Cloud Player and play music with a browser from any device, anywhere. There are free and paid options depending on the storage capacity.

Listening Options

After selecting a service the next thing is to go to the website of that service and use their built-inbrowser for listening to your favorite music. There are certain hitches in this process. If you have a practice of working with lot of tabs then you can inadvertently cut off the music by closing the wrong tab.

This type of glitches can be solved with a browser extension. However, it is difficult to find such a browser extension. Some service providers like Zune or Spotify has its own software that the users are expected to download.

If you are not interested in downloading software or using paid service for listening musicthen there are other alternatives. There are some browser extensions that are not related with any specific service. If you are using Google Chrome as your browser then look for the extension Radio Player Live. This offers access to hundreds of free online radio channels. Last.fm is probably the best player offered by Chrome.

If you have stored your favorite music albums in DropBox then go for DropBox Audio Player for listening them. If you are using Firefox as your browser then look for Fire.fm extension.

Finally

Using your browser as a music player is at a nascent stage of development. With phenomenal growth and spread of Internet this concept is likely to gain momentum. By far, Google Chrome seems to be most prepared. However, if you have a look at web store of the Chrome then you may be surprised to find that most of these “players” are listed as “web apps” and not as “extensions” as expected.