Mathias Panzenböck, a programmer in Vienna, has been working quite a long time on a Web 2.0 style audio player for Magnatune. It works in pretty much all contemporary web browsers, despite the very fancy HTML5 features he uses.
His audio player is now very feature complete, and I'd like to recommend you give it a try at:
greattuneplayer.jit.su
Mathias calls it the "Greattune Player" (because "magna" means "great" in latin) and with it, you can:
1) browse albums by genre
2) drag and drop songs into playlists
3) as a member, download albums in any format
4) drag recommendations to your playlists, to listen to them later
5) export your playlists into files (even as html web pages you can put on your web site) that will play in most any music program
6) view artist bios, album art, embed the album in your blog, and more...
In short, pretty much everything you can do on the Magnatune web site, you can do with the "Greattune player", except that you can do it with Web 2.0/HTML5 goodness.
I've placed an icon on the magnatune home page so you can easily jump to the "Greattune player". You'll find it toward the bottom left of the page:
Below are some screen pictures of the player in action, showing me playing and browsing, modifying my playlist, and exporting my playlist as well.
Dear John,The player is a real opus magnum for Mathias.The great effect is cruelly spoiled by "the voices" which you said once upon a time had to disappear.Wouldn't be a notice between songs enough?I opt it would.
Posted by: tpmark | June 18, 2012 at 02:34 PM
tpmark -- the voices do go away if you're a member.
Click the "member" checkbox, and enter your name and password, and you'll only hear music.
Alas, if Magnatune gave away all of its music without ads, completely for free, we wouldn't have any revenue, and we'd have to close down. So... if you enjoy our music, please do become a member!
Posted by: John Buckman | June 19, 2012 at 01:06 AM
The only thing it's really missing is the "Share on" buttons for the various social networks or via email.
It will be great to see this eventually populated with the complete Magnatune library. I see many more albums have been added of late but there are still holes here and there.
Also I plan to test this player out later tonight via Nintendo Wii.
Posted by: Spike Page | June 19, 2012 at 02:40 PM
Not to put anyone down (I really think a new player is called for), but the aesthetics of the player is incredibly dated. I should hope that a designer can get the opportunity to spruce it up as it's very lacking at the moment.
Great news with the player itself, though.
Posted by: drspinderwalf | June 23, 2012 at 10:31 AM
Yeah, I'm thinking about adding share buttons. But things like Share This or Add This do not work with dynamic content. I don't want to write it all myself. And I don't want to use the original codes from facebook and twitter etc., because I don't want these services to be able to track my visitors. Hmmm, would there be *anyone* who would want a feature like "tweet all songs/albums/artists I'm listening to"? (Meh, I don't have time to implement that anyway.)
But the library should be always up to date. I run a cron job every night at 00:00 (at whatever timezone the nodejitsu server is; it's somewhere in the USA) that checks for DB updates and loads them, if there are any. So it might be that Greattune Player's DB is max. 24h behind Magnatune's DB. Note that when you sort albums by date the order within one day is somehow different than what the Magnatune website gives you. I sort by whatever is the date in the SQLite dump, don't know how Magnatune sorts it.
Posted by: panzi | June 23, 2012 at 12:02 PM
Sweet! Will definitely be trying this out.
Design - a good graphical designer could probably do some trivial (in terms of time spent) adjustments to make it look awesome, the basics are there.
Posted by: Ole Laursen | June 30, 2012 at 06:48 AM
Nodejitsu (the hoster I use for Greattune Player) currently has some problems. I was told it will be fixed sometime next week. So Greattune Player is down until then. :(
Posted by: panzi | July 12, 2012 at 12:07 PM
I found time to work around the problem by porting it to another SQLite bindings module. There are a lot of these for node, and it seems my random pick wasn't the best.
So Greattune Player should work again.
Posted by: panzi | July 20, 2012 at 07:58 PM
Ok, I added social share buttons. I really think these buttons are ugly, but oh well. Users want them. I didn't simply embed the buttons directly, but used a jQuery plugin that requires a second click (the first click only activates the button). I do this so users browsing through the music using Greattune Player cannot be tracked by Facebook & Co.
The URL of albums and artists that gets liked actually is the respective URL on http://magnatune.com/, not on http://greattuneplayer.jit.su/. Interestingly some albums have already likes, e.g.: http://greattuneplayer.jit.su/#/album/Music%20from%20Braid
Posted by: panzi | July 22, 2012 at 06:52 PM
This is great! Have been using greattune for the whole day and it is amazing! Yes the UI could be improved but I am not looking all the time to the music player, so I don't care much.
Thanks for the player! :D
Posted by: Andres | August 08, 2012 at 02:11 PM