FoxyTunes Adds Blip.fm Player
Yahoo! has released a major update to FoxyTunes that, among a host of other new features, now supports Blip.fm playback. FoxyTunes is a FireFox add-on that controls a variety of music players including iTunes, Last.fm, Pandora, and even YouTube directly from the browser status bar. It allows you to listen to your music while browsing other sites, without the need to switch to the player to change the track or find out what’s currently playing.
What’s got us excited about the latest release is the addition of Blip.fm as a music player. Now you can control any Blip.fm stream from the toolbar, without hunting for the tab that’s playing the music. The FoxyTunes add-on supports all the standard playback options you would expect, like play, pause, next and volume control (yes, they even beat us to a volume slider).
In addition to playback, this release of FoxyTunes lets you update your status on Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo! with the currently playing track. It doesn’t support posting to Blip.fm yet, but you can bet we’ll be working with their team to get that added in the near future.
The FoxyTunes team has done a great job adding an extra layer of information about the currently playing track that makes this add-on indispensable. A compact breakaway information window tells you the artist and title, along with album art (when available), and contextual menus for “Search” and “Explore”. These menus get you quick access to search results, lyrics, and FoxyTunes’ own mashup artist page containing Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and a ton of other stuff. Ahem, this page is obviously lacking “recent blips” by the artists… something we shall hope to remedy.
Download FoxyTunes and check it out. Also make sure to send feedback to let them know how you like the Blip.fm support. Their development team (like us) thrives on comments, so let ‘er rip.
7 Comments
Ian White on August 24th, 2009
JefTank: I couldn’t get it to crash (OS X, FF 3.5.2). The only problem I’ve noticed is that playback stops working if you close the Blip.fm tab that FoxyTunes opens. I’m sure if you email their support team they’ll help you get it sorted out.
@briangreene on August 24th, 2009
congrats to team yahoo. nice integration. pity its only IE & FF and not Chrome compatible but that is not FoxyTunes problem its Googles.
Ahem, kudos to bliptools (http://short.ie/bliptools) which was first to put volume slider into blip ahead of blip & yahoo. 
The integration is sweet, and the blip code meshes snugly with the yahoo player code under the hood. some day we will be able to blip in from a right click to a yahoo player that is blip aware… (i hope)
For performance reasons I will continue to blip in chrome, love the way Flash dont kill all my tabs when blip & youtube have a fight with my CPU, I just put foxytunes into flock but it only supports 3.5.9 
dabbler on August 24th, 2009
would be incredibly useful to add posting to Blip.fm while listening to a song. wow, that would be pretty much perfect actually!
Nimrod on August 24th, 2009
@JefTank - please contact us at info@foxytunes.com and we’ll do our best to help you.
Nimrod Bar
FoxyTunes
ChaCha Fance on August 25th, 2009
Weird I don’t have Blip.fm as an option on mine and Firefox says there’s no update needed for the addon……… hmmmm. I’ll have to figure it out.
@briangreene on August 27th, 2009
@ChaCha Fance
I didnt get prompted for an update either so I went and forced one. http://www.foxytunes.com/firefox/download/
JefTank on August 24th, 2009
It’s buggy, crashes or freazes Firefox. It also may interfere with Blip FM’s interface while Foxytunes is working, and you are on Blip.fm’s page. I uninstalled it until a later, less buggier release is issued.