We just released the Easylistener web music player. You can use it to easily share web music you love on your blog or favorite social network page. We’ve even built this cool embed code generator so you can configure it however you want -- easily.
You’re probably thinking – big deal, there’s already a ton of cool radio player widgets (last.fm, finetune, MOG, Sonific, RBG, etc.) on the web these days. Everyone I know and their brother’s girlfriend’s cousin has released some form of music-player widget to promote a particular media service or offering.
Easylistener is different. It's not about promoting a particular product or service. It’s about embracing a new ideology – one of free-flowing music and ideas, shared via the web by real people who love music.
What can Easylistener do? For starters, it supports virtually any web page as a potential music source. You can point it at a music blog like Scissorkick, or a playlist document like XSPF, M3U or ASX. You can even give it a RSS or ATOM feed and it will play any mp3 links it finds in the feed. This lets you to do some pretty cool stuff like use Pipes to create a RSS feed of recently listened to tracks from last.fm that are also on Hype Machine and then play them back using Easylistener. Wow!
Easylistener makes it easy to play any page on the web with mp3 links in it. But this has nothing to do with “stealing" music or even listening to it for free. Music from artists that inspire and captivate you is always worth paying for. You should go to their shows, pick up a t-shirt, and buy their music. But these days we are virtually drowning in musical choice. Music is ubiquitous -- it surrounds us everywhere, so much so that paradoxically it becomes hard to find. Easylistener is about promoting artists and making it easy for you to share their music so the rest of us can discover new music.
It's also about empowering people to share their own work. I'm not a great musician, but I do love making music. My friends and I get together and jam, and then there’s all that music I played in college. How easy is it to share my own music now? Well, I had to upload the mp3s, and then I had to point Easylistener to them. Damn, that was pretty easy.
Of course, all this web music goodness didn’t come out of nowhere. I remember playing with the desktop media platform Songbird earlier this year and thinking, "Wow, this thing is awesome. What if something like this could run in a web browser and be shared like a widget--almost like a Songbird for the web." I wanted that and I was lucky enough to get a chance to build it.
Songbird is an amazing product and was definitely a huge inspiration for Joe Magnani and I as we developed Easylistener in the Yahoo! Media Innovation Group. Then, of course, we should also acknowledge the influence of the OG player XSPF Web Music Player by Fabricio Zuardi. Fabricio's app is a classic, so it's not surprising we modeled some core features off it. Respect.
Finally, I should mention Yahoo!’s chief playlisting scientist Lucas Gonze, whose visionary ideas got me thinking about this stuff in the first place. I had the pleasure of working with Lucas to help port his amazing Playthispage service from Webjay to Yahoo!. I can’t tell you how psyched I am about the new stuff his team has been working on and what’s coming up next from Yahoo! Music.
But don’t take my word for it -- try Easylistener for yourself. Join the growing number of sites like My Old Kentucky Blog, Swedelife, songs:illinois, and Indie Music Filter already using it. Put Easylistener on your MySpace, blog, or personal website today and tell us what you think.
Popularity: 35% [?]
Who We Are
Search
Stay Connected
Recent Posts
Next* Links
Our Community
When / Where
About Next*
Comment by Joe Lazarus — November 30th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
Thanks for featuring my Last.fm / Pipes / Hype Machine / Tumblr / Easylistener mashup. It’s pretty exciting that a guy like me who's never written code can piece together something like that with the tools you’re providing. Easylistener is pretty awesome… right down to the details like the fade between tracks, the code generator, even the voice recorded error message is soothing and cool.
Amazing job guys! Congrats
Comment by lkratz — December 3rd, 2007 at 5:48 am
Hi,
Jamendo may also be widgetize !
the nice thing with jamendo is all the music is licenced under a Creative Commons license !
http://www.jamendo.com/en/
Thus listening, copying, downloadling is legal …
–
Laurent
Comment by Cory McGuffin — December 3rd, 2007 at 9:51 pm
So is their anyway to do many sites?
I don’t really want to use music I would rather have audio blogs…
twit
windows weekly
gadget whiz and so on
can this happen now or can someone make this happen?
Comment by Greg — December 4th, 2007 at 10:21 am
Nice work guys! Looks like a cool little player. At Grabb.it, we’ve got something similar in a Javascript bookmarklet that dynamically builds the playlist for any web page you’re on and then adds the player to the page:
http://grabb.it/pages/playable
Bloggers can also use it to make their own pages playable by linking to its source in a script tag.
Comment by Rich Ziade — December 4th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Very sweet. One question: what if a playlist file changes while Easylistener has loaded the list? Is there a way to ping/tell the player that the list has chnaged while its playing through a list?
Regardless - great work!
Thanks,
Rich
Comment by William White — December 4th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
Hi Rich,
Thanks for your feedback! In order to avoid swamping other websites, Easylistener caches each page it crawls for 60 minutes.
There is no publicly available method to force a refresh, but if you are patient - Easylistener will grab the updated version within the hour. :-)
Comment by William White — December 4th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
Hi Cory,
Music Blogs are one of the best applications of Easylistener! Just pass in the URL of your favorite music blog and Easylistener will start playing back all the tunes on that site…
Check out the Music Blogs Facebook app - which uses Easylistener to play back mp3s from the most popular blogs on the web:
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?api_key=dc06d09fff0d4f534af219539aa5595e
Comment by Jens Alfke — December 5th, 2007 at 10:17 am
Great widget, except that I can’t get it to work reliably. Hope you don’t mind my reporting the problem here (I didn’t see any link to a bug report page.)
With many (but not all) of the HTML pages I point it to, it lists the linked-to tracks, but then draws a “no” (circle-slash) symbol next to each one, and won’t play any of them. Presumably that means it failed to fetch the MP3.
In these cases I’ve been able to play the music directly in Safari. I’ve also viewed the source of the page, and any linked m3u files, and used ‘curl’ to download the MP3s from the command line. So I know the links work and the servers aren’t requiring any special logins or cookies.
Two URLs this happens with:
http://www.theselector.org/
http://www.emusic.com/album/For-Against-Echelons-MP3-Download/11035336.html
(it seems to happen with *any* eMusic album page.)
My configuration: MacBook Pro, OS X 10.5, Safari 3, latest Flash 9 plugin (just downloaded new version from Adobe yesterday.)
Comment by Jens Alfke — December 5th, 2007 at 10:33 am
Regarding my previous comment — I think I understand the problem now. I sniffed the HTTP traffic, and in the case of theselector.org, the server is refusing the GET of the .mp3, returning a 403 Forbidden. I believe this is because the server’s set up to block “leeching” … the request has a Referer header pointing back to the page the player is embedded in, which is of course from another domain. (When I use curl there’s no Referer at all, which is presumably why the server didn’t object.)
I don’t know Flash, but is it possible for the player to fetch the MP3s without Referer headers? But then again, that might be considered an unethical way to get around the server’s deliberate policies…
Comment by William White — December 5th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
Hi Jens,
Thanks for your comment and your technical explanation.
Easylistener will try to to find mp3s and then play them back for you. Sometimes, however - things happen. The audio files may have been taken down, the mp3 host may have rules that stop files being accessed in certain ways, or maybe there’s just network latency causing a hiccup. Sometimes simply moving on to another blog and coming back in 5 minutes will resolve your issue.
When I go to http://next.yahoo.net/archives/32/easylistener and paste
http://www.theselector.org/ into the Playlist URL, I am able to start listening to tunes from that site. But I totally believe you that you’re having trouble listening to them yourself. Ultimately, these issues are usually (as you allude to in your second comment) related to policies that exist on sites which host mp3 files - stuff that is obviously beyond our control.
Part of what makes my job difficult is handling cases where websites are not adhering to common standards. So we’re not going to update Easylistener to ignore these standards (such as passing in a referrer), but if you host mp3 files yourself - you can do things that will improve how Easylistener interacts with your site such as adding a crossdomain.xml to your server root:
http://musiclibre.org/blog/2007/08/21/please-add-a-crossdomainxml-to-your-mp3-site/
Comment by Lucas — December 5th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Jens, respecting the wishes of the server operator is a feature, not a bug.
Comment by Rafa — December 5th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
FANTASTIC !!! we are testing in http://www.ipunkforos.com (P u n k pwp pwp1) and the result is really really good.
Comment by John Grainger — January 11th, 2008 at 1:04 am
Nice little interface…BUT…there’s ONE thing everyone seems to overlook when creating these players…………
After “playing” a track…if you look in your Temporary Internet Folder you will find…..the audio file there, just waiting to be copied out! Hmmmm…
What I would like to see (and it should be the MAIN feature of the software) is a player that streams music, but DOESN’T cache the file.
If I could find a player that does that, I wouldn’t give a damn how “pretty” it looked!
Comment by John — January 11th, 2008 at 1:07 am
WHOOPS! - It STILL caches the audio file in the Temp Internet Folder! (Just begs to be copied out).
If I could find a player that streamed music but DOESN’T cache the audio file…I wouldn’t give a damn how pretty it looked!
Comment by Gasder — January 13th, 2008 at 3:47 am
Very interasting tool. Besides, you can downloud a lot of music on http://loadingvault.com. Very useful rapidshare search. It includes over 4 000 000 files. Loadingvault.com is a best search engine designed to search files in various file sharing and uploading sites.
Comment by Kenji — January 13th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Great work!
Just one thing. Please support international character. XSPF playlist support UTF-8 but easylistener don’t display Japanese .
Maybe font problem.
Thank you.
Comment by Storm — January 17th, 2008 at 9:21 am
Hi there! It’s such a beautiful little player, but I do have a question. How would one go about linking a playlist document to the player? I’m not much of a widget-wiz so a little help would definitely be appreciated. Keep up the great work guys!
Comment by William+White — January 17th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
Hey Storm - thanks for your feedback. Just paste the URL of your XSPF playlist (or any webpage with mp3 links in it) into the “Playlist URL” field of our handy code creator at http://next.yahoo.net/archives/32/easylistener
Then you can choose the color or size of player you want by playing around with the various buttons in the Code Creator. When you’re happy with how it looks - click the Copy To Clipboard button. You can then paste the player “embed codes” into your webpage, blog or anywhere else you want it to go!
You should also check out its paternal relative - the new Y! Media Player:
http://developer.yahoo.com/mediaplayer/
Cheers.
WW
Comment by Moshable — January 19th, 2008 at 1:57 am
Brilliant, i’m totally downloading htat.
Comment by heiste — January 26th, 2008 at 2:42 am
Excellent, you did a great job. Thank you very much, I shall use it often.
Comment by miodrag — February 2nd, 2008 at 11:35 pm
dear Sir ,
Need me some program, with who I can make play list of one big mp3 file.
Example my file is longer 10-20mb, but more severs don’t get loge file than 0,5mb, program worked next he get little pices of this file.
Where I can find program like this?
trajanovic
http://www.ovde.com/poezija
trajanovicmiodrag@yahoo.com
Comment by Aaron — February 3rd, 2008 at 3:48 pm
I love this new tool you all have created. I created an RSS feed and put some MP3’s in it and put it on my web server and also put the crossdomain.xml in the server root folder; however, the player shows a red circle beside whatever MP3 it tries to play. Weird thing is, if I click on the button to download the MP3 - it works! For some reason the player just won’t play my xml sheet. I created one to test with at http://christtemplechurch.net/index.xml.
Thanks for any help.
Comment by Aaron — February 3rd, 2008 at 3:51 pm
the above link needs to be http://www.christtemplechurch.net/index.xml
Thanks,
Aaron
Comment by William White — February 6th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Hey Aaron,
Thanks for your question. Easylistener is not playing back your playlist xml properly because it doesn’t understand your RSS.
Specifically the link element in an RSS feed item is meant to point to a blog post URL, rather than directly at a mp3 document. I’d recommend using XSPF (http://xspf.org/quickstart/) to create the type of playlist document it looks like you’re after. Here’s an example from Chris Budd’s website:
http://www.indiemusicfilter.com/xspf_player/playlist.xspf
You can pass a standard RSS feed from a music blog into Easylistener and it should play it back pretty well (depending upon what the blogger has made available via the feed), however it’s going to look for the MP3s in RSS enclosures or as links in the content of the blog post itself.
Hope this helps and thanks for using Easylistener!
William.
Comment by khmerbird — February 18th, 2008 at 2:06 am
i have using XSPF and i like it due to it allow us easily to add the song,
i have visited your new playlist and i can point it to my playlist.php, it works fine. it looks cool, just one problem is it possible to disable the download link when we right click?
Comment by Kevan — February 27th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Dudes and dudettes, this application is a miracle-working wonder-machine. I’ve never encountered such an effortless display of awesomeness. I’ve implemented this fabulous device on two sites I edit:
Kevan Gilbert Online gets to play now.
Union Gospel Mission gets some bonus audio, too.
Guys, I went through about 30 music player widgets before discovering this. I can’t believe how much this rocks.
Comment by Dan — March 1st, 2008 at 3:38 pm
How do I disable the right-clicking in the widget to prevent people from downloading the songs?
Comment by Andrew — March 5th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Excellent! Onto downloading it right now… Thanks!
Comment by sneak — March 13th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
What a great, great player ! I’m just wondering how I can make it point to a .m3u file, I can’t get that to work.
Comment by lanfear — March 20th, 2008 at 1:35 am
Great work, I have a question:
Will you allow people to host the player (.swf file) themselves? It would feel “safer” and be faster as well to not dependend upon a thir party webserver for the player.
Keep up the good work!
Comment by William — March 21st, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Hey lanfear,
We host Easylistener so you don’t have to. This also helps us to ensure a consistent experience for all users as we make improvements to the player.
The SWF is hosted off Yahoo’s global cache system. This is a *very reliable solution* which spans many different data centers all over the world. If one of the servers fails, there are hundreds of backup servers that will serve your users the player. Fear not my friend - we have your back.
Thanks!
William.
Comment by Checker — March 26th, 2008 at 4:26 am
Hi! Thanks for this tool! I’ll use it on my blog - needfornews.com
Comment by Steve — March 27th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Cool app! I’m lucky to have found out about this. I’ve been trying various flash mp3 players and this one looks the best and the easiest to setup. I just added it to my Photon Laser Tag tribute site under my Multimedia section to play Photon soundtracks used in the 80’s during the Laser Tag games. Thanks for making this. Next I need a flash video player for my website too. ;)
Comment by Daniel Perry — March 31st, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I was wondering if the author of this applet would mind explaining the skin_color_1 and skin_color_2 variables to me, as I would like to try to make the player blend in better with the background of my page.
As your generator creates it, there are only two background colours; Black, and white, neither of which remotely match my current background colour (#61380B), making the player stick out and look quite out of place with the rest of the layout.
The values that those two variables take look like they might be CMYK values, however when I attempt to plug in the equivalent CMYK variables, the result is far from what I expected ;)
Is there a transparency value for the background of the player?
Comment by rapidshare — April 1st, 2008 at 7:36 am
I completely agree with all that here is told
“So you can find the information on it on my search resource
http://fileshunt.com“
Comment by rabin — April 1st, 2008 at 10:21 am
Hi how does the playlist URL work? can u give examples of how to upload songs into the music player? i will appreciate your help alot!
what does “Easylistener will crawl this page and playback any mp3s it finds” mean?
I thank you for your kind help.
Comment by Tatiana — April 17th, 2008 at 7:37 am
I have found a interesting source ( http://filesfinds.com ) and would like to give the benefit of my experience to you.
Comment by Don777 — April 29th, 2008 at 7:23 am
I like this player, but I would like it to auto shuffle so that the same song does mot play as people come to my page. Is there a code I can insert to make it do this?
Thanks
Don
Comment by waxwing — May 5th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
i love the simplicity of this player. but, when i type in the pages with the mp3 links, it works on here, but when i paste the code on the my own page, it tells me that it cannot understand the request. i’m seeing the player fine on my site, but it is not playing the mp3 like it is on here. please advise! thanks!
Comment by Morgan — May 7th, 2008 at 4:18 am
Hi.
A very good work! But I have a request …
Is it possible to open the “track info” link in the same window, with a javascript like Lighbox? I don’t want to open the “track info” URL in a new window.
I try with ASX syntax but it doesn’t work, it still open the URL in a new window.
Thanks, Morgan