Dan Kantor, the man behind de.licio.us’s Playtagger and Firefox extension, has brought us a new toy to play with that literally makes the web your musical oyster. ExtensionFM is a Chrome extension that automatically scrubs the websites you visit, finds embedded music, and adds it to a library of online music.
As time has gone on, we’ve found fewer and fewer reasons to actually download music and ExtensionFM gives us one less.
Kantor has done some big things in online music over the years. He created Playtagger, a music player that made mp3 bookmarks in de.licio.us playable right there on the page, and founded Streampad, a social web-scale music application that was acquired by AOL in 2008. If you use the Firefox plug-in for Delicious, Kantor built that too. Until 2009, he was the product director of AOL Music and now he brings us ExtensionFM.
Kantor pre-released the music plugin just over two weeks ago with little to-do, but we can’t get enough of it. ExtensionFM runs quietly in the background as you browse, collecting any and all tracks and archiving them. If you decide you’d like to listen as you go, you can simply click on the icon and play individual songs, queue songs, or play or queue them all. If you decide that you like a song enough to own it, you can simply right click on it and chose “Buy”, which sends you to the song on Amazon. But even if that were to not work, the program keeps the link to the site where it originally found the song.
Then, when you switch over to the full screen extension, all of the tracks you’ve discovered while browsing are neatly organized by artist, album, track name and even the site where it was originally discovered, with a link, so you can go back and find out more about tracks you like.
When you first start up ExtensionFM, it has six featured sites, including Spinner, Live Music Archive, Pitchfork, Stereogum, Daytrotter and Tuneage, making it easy to get going.
What’s even more, ExtensionFM will let you “scrobble” to Last.fm, which means it will follow along and keep track of your music listening habits and send them to your Last.fm account.
We got in touch with Kantor this afternoon and he told us that he does have plans to make ExtensionFM available as a Firefox add-on at some point in the future, but for now it is only available for Chrome. He also said that right now, music can only be played when the user is online, but that offline playing is another feature they’re looking into.
Because we have a supply of just 50 beta invite codes, we’ve put information on how to get your invite on our Facebook page. Head there now to be one of the lucky few, and if you’re so inclined, we’d love it if you added us to your Facebook friends, as well!
