Dan Kantor, the brains behind Streampad, has quietly launched a new web music player called ExtensionFM. Implemented as a Chrome extension, ExtensionFM automatically captures tunes from websites you visit and allows you to browse, queue and play them in a few simple ways. After playing with it for a couple weeks, ExtFM has become a complement to sites with similar discovery features (HypeM, We Are Hunted) and has filled some of my least favorite gaps in others (play-all from the Tumblr dashboard).
Here’s how it works. When you land on a site with mp3s, ExtensionFM captures them and shows you that new tunes are available. In the screenshot below, the ExtFM button shows that it’s grabbed 75 new tunes from Stereogum.
Click the button to see and play the tunes on the current page. Playing is continuous, so when the first tune completes, it automatically begins playing the next.
ExtensionFM captures tracks as you browse. To view all your discovered tracks, pop open the All Songs player, displayed in the top image. The familiar panel view — a la iTunes — displays sites, artists and albums with links to the original post and more info. The single column view below is a simple player.
The tracks in your player are persistent across sessions, so as I browse my favorite music sites day after day, I’m curating a library of music I can browse and play on demand.
There’s a nice intro screencast of ExtensionFM on the landing page: http://www.extension.fm/ Check it out for more detail and to request a pre-release access code.
