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Comment by rgrau | Hacker News Reader

What I miss most about those collections is that they are browser based, and when I'm programming, if I need the music to stop, or I get a call, or something, I have to go find the tab and manually stop it.

I'm trying to maintain a list of radios in .pls/.m3u format [1], so I can choose how I play them (emacs+mplayer).

- Don't like the current song? m-x kill-radio RET

- Want to store the current name of the song? m-x hit RET

Making the interface as painless as possible is part of what makes music for programming more relaxing to me. I find strange there are not more of those kinds of repos around (I haven't found them)

1. https://github.com/kidd/radios

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I'm not a big fan of chrome for a lot of reasons these days, but recent-ish chrome got a feature of a button in the top-right that's present whenever audio is playing somewhere in the browser, that shows all media playing, and that lets you pause/play or move through playlists regardless of the tab you're on.

Using it, I can see what's playing in a youtube tab and pause it while I type this without leaving the tab. If you leave audio paused/stopped long enough though (~a few minutes), it'll stop being accessible through that control and you have to go to the tab you started it in.

I use this a lot when I have 1-2 talks and 2-3 music tabs open, sometimes scattered among 50-80 other tabs.

edit: and I've just confirmed for myself that this control works for content on musicforprogramming.net :)

Sounds like you might be interested in playerctl [0]. I use global shortcuts for its play, pause, next, and previous actions. It has the ability to control Spotify, Firefox and other players. And Firefox media controls work for YouTube, SoundCloud, and even the site this post is about.

0: https://github.com/altdesktop/playerctl

yes! that looks super useful indeed. Thanks!

I can confirm, I integrated playerctl with my i3 environment, very pleased by it! Especially binding pause with locking my screen, it prevent me to loose track of my current podcast.

The only limitation that I found : if you have multiples media playing, playerctl will interact only with the lastest used one. So when you are running multiples one, you can't stop them all at once.

BTW, since there are links to mp3s here, you could probably dump them into a playlist like the radios.

Browsers do support media controls these days, but that likely excludes the prev/next buttons on most sites—like in this case.

My personal gripe with online music players is that they often don't have volume control and play at ludicrous loudness (ahem), whereas everything audio-playing on my system is adjusted to a certain average volume, and I only make small nudges now and then since we still haven't learned to normalize.

> What I miss most about those collections is that they are browser based

No, they're not... there's an MP3 download link for each of the titles on that page.

Yep, sorry about that, I meant in general. This particular case is fine, and I am grateful for that.

The latest Mac OS has a Status Menu bar icon that gives you play/pause for all playing items, including specific browser tabs.

fwiw there's an MP3 link at the top of each episode's description, and a link to a torrent of episodes 1-52 at the bottom.

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