Unofficial Google Play Music Desktop Client | Hacker News Reader

Unofficial Google Play Music Desktop Client

github.com

99 pointsdcschelt48 comments

> Never again will you have to hunt through your tabs to pause your music,

> Supports media keys (play, pause, stop, next, previous)

A relatively recent Chrome feature that many aren't aware of is the ability of extensions and apps to use Chrome- or desktop-wide (global) hotkeys. So if you're using the Google Play Music extension, you can, for example, hook it up to your media keys and it will work even when Chrome isn't focused. Go to chrome://extensions/ and scroll down the Keyboard shortcuts to learn more.

(I'm sure that there are many other reasons people prefer desktop apps, but this was the big one for me.)

There is an extension that enables this for multiple music sites too: http://www.streamkeys.com/

There are also extensions that helps with this. If you have media keys it allows you to use those regardless of focus. Plus you can get popups on song change or other various settings.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/prime-player-for-g...

If you install the official GPM extension, you will be able to use the media keys.

> Never again will you have to hunt through your tabs to pause your music, or stop listening to your favourite song because Chrome is guzzling up all your RAM..

> Dev Requirements

> Node.js (Recommend 4.2.x)

Yeah, right....

What's the problem with the requirements?

OP is challenging the claim that node will be more memory efficient than Chrome.

Perhaps more importantly, Electron is literally Chromium.

Yeah, that's an odd claim considering that it's built on Electron, which is Chromium-based.

This is looking good, but Radiant Player is the current king of Google Play Music on OSX.

https://radiant-player.github.io/radiant-player-mac/

    brew install Caskroom/cask/radiant-player

The difference is that Radiant requires Flash as far as I read.

Last I checked so did the Google Play website player.

You should check again; it's tucked under the labs section but there's an HTML5 audio player available as a Flash alternative. Doesn't work in Safari though.

Ah, I was using Safari. Thanks!

Yeah just yesterday I was looking for something to play Google Music through on my new MBP, found Radiant, saw it required Flash and proceeded to move on. I'm on a 14 day trial of Gear Player, which seems nice but seems lacking for how I interact with my music.

It works well enough, has album art views, something I do want as a feature, but Radiant has a nicer overall UI (IMO), has a mini player that I can tuck away in the corner somewhere, and has the ability to add new playlists within the app. Installing flash is that much of a dealbreaker for me.

Radiant looks a little more native too

> Never again will you have to hunt through your tabs to pause your music

Not exactly the same thing, but in Chrome, you can enable "Tab audio muting UI control" in chrome://flags which allows you to click the speaker icon on tabs that play music to mute it. Click again to unmute. Very handy for when you get a phone call!

FWIW there is a standard in the works (Media Session [1]) that will enable various use cases[2] for web app users to control with media keys, headphone buttons, from lock screen, notification area, ducking for phone calls etc

1. https://mediasession.spec.whatwg.org/

2. https://github.com/whatwg/mediasession#use-cases

Firefox has the same thing, enabled by default.

The lack of this by default is something that has annoyed me whenever I have been forced to use chrome.

To didn't enable a setting in Chrome, yet this still works for me, and has for a while.

Literally just a webview in an X window. This is not a 'desktop app'. This is bastardized web.

When does a 'desktop app' become a 'bastardised web' (sic). Is it when it communicates via http? When it renders HTML? Lots of apps that you may be running (e.g. iTunes, the Mac app store) do this. If it's well integrated with the host OS, I don't see what the problem is; would you rather it weren't cross-platform, or it used another cross-platform framework, or it were several separate codebases?

> When does a 'desktop app' become a 'bastardised web'

When it is a chrome over a gigantic web view instead of properly making use of native UI widgets.

> iTunes, the Mac app store

Both good examples on how not to do it, specially on Windows.

Give me a native app that uses native widgets, works with native toolkits, and can be themed with my Qt theme.

Give me a native app that feels native, that looks native, and that is native.

Any included WebView to display content is an instant "nope" criterium, because the WebView content won't be themeable or look or feel native.

That doesn't make it any less useful--even though I find it a bit unnecessary. To note, that a program like that can be made within 10 minutes in Visual Studio (there is a video on Yt for a similar one integrating Fb Messenger).

Get off my lawn!

No Chromecast Support. Non-Starter for me.

That was the first thing I went to find as well. It's too bad.

My thoughts exactly.

I noticed the tray icon for this in OSX isn't black. It would seem more native if it matched.

I encourage all open source projects so this is cool. That said, I just open Play Music in a new Chrome window, not a tab, and use the keyboard to switch between Chrome Windows and other apps. Easy enough. I also sometimes have my iPad Pro running music while I work on my laptop.

Check out my favorite media player, cmus. It's a light weight iTunes alternative for command line.

I was a little surprised that the download was 50Mb, but this app is very well done. Really like the theming options.

Heyyyyyy ... http://i.imgur.com/VucG9gy.png ... That's basically Spotify (desktop application). The resemblance being so high makes this a little iffy, and suggests this project won't stay up (at least in its present form) for too long.

That said, why hasn't Google yet created a desktop application for Google Play Music? It's mind-boggling to me. I would love to ditch Spotify (primarily because 1) I don't like its searching/discovery UI, and 2) its desktop application is slow and buggy as well)

This is Electron-based, but it looks a lot more integration than a normal Electron skin. I consider it may be worth looking into especially with the media button integration.

> That's basically Spotify

Looks pretty generic to me. Grooveshark had a similar look.

And this is what play.google.com/music/listen looks like: http://i.imgur.com/9dmTu6h.jpg :)

And when you click on the mini-player button at the lower right corner you get, you guessed it, a mini-player.

From their perspective, they have a desktop application for Google Play Music in the form of the Chrome browser.

>That said, why hasn't Google yet created a desktop application for Google Play Music?

I don't understand the need (and I guess that Google does not either).

Is it because you need an offline mode ? That's the only addition I can think of.

With the play music chrome extension, the website responds to media keys, so outside of a dedicated app icon in the tray (even though the miniplayer has one), I don't see what a desktop app would bring.

Even without extensions, those things are possible or will soon be possible[1] on the web out of the box (except tray icon but persistent notification with actions can be done to achieve something similar).

1. https://github.com/whatwg/mediasession#use-cases

You can also play your local music with apps like Spotify. No desktop client is a huge issue for me.

The only reason Spotify needs the ability to play local music is to play music that is not on Spotify. Most other services, including this Google one, let you upload your collection to play on any device.

Why would I want to waste bandwidth/traffic quota on music I have locally?

because that way you don't need to keep these files locally.

My collection is quite large, it is backed on a hard drive and also available on Play Music.

Since they have a good matching algorithm, uploading an album is often instantaneous.

It is probably not for everyone, but I really like this service.

Ok, maybe I worded that to strongly. It is a great feature as an option, but IMHO the software should still be able to use local files if they are available.

So Spotify move all their infrastructure from AWS to Google Cloud, and now this? Seems pretty obvious what's going on here...

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