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Comment by mrinterweb | Hacker News Reader

My main issue with Google Play Music is that they don't have a desktop app. I wouldn't even care if their desktop app was a wrapper around their HTML player. I just want keyboard music controls from my desktop and the ability to Cmd+Tab to the music app instead of hunting down the browser tab. Without a desktop app, using Google Play Music is disruptive to my workflow.

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You can make any website a webwrapper "desktop app" using Chrome/Chromium's "Create application shortcuts..." in its More Tools menu. It just opens the website without any browser chrome, and prompts you to create a desktop shortcut for it. For a while, this was what Slack was recommending to Windows users for a "native" application, and it is still what they recommend to Linux users (see the bottom of the page here: https://slack.com/getting-started).

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95710?hl=en

That feature is not in Mac Chrome, and it does not help with listening offline.

You can use the Google Play Music Chrome extension[1] to fix that.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-play-music/...

Yep. It has other features that I never use, but the media key functionality is great.

I remember using that extension a while ago, and I forget why I found it lacking. It seems to work pretty well now. Thanks for the reminder.

I'm pretty sure the Google Play Music web app can respond to media keys, at least in Chrome. Here's someone describing how to disable it:

http://www.omgchrome.com/chrome-google-music-media-keys/

Have you looked at Radiant Player?

http://www.sajidanwar.me/radiant-player-mac/

I tried this for a while and it was slow and crashed pretty much every time I used it. Sucks because it was exactly what I needed.

When did you try it the last time? I never had stability issues with recent versions. Sometimes (very seldom) it ends up eating 100% CPU, but restarting it fixes that.

Creator of Radiant Player here. Performance and memory issues were a problem in the past and unfortunately have resurfaced in the latest release (1.4.0), but I am looking into them!

Hi there, do you know what's up with HTML5 audio lately?

Thanks! I really want to use it so Ill be looking out for future releases

Very nice app but I uninstalled after awhile because I want to get rid of Adobe Flash Player. It (the Adobe software, not Radiant Player) kept asking me to update itself...

The best solution that I've found is Bearded Spice (http://beardedspice.com/) which works with most web music players.

On Windows I use Outcold Player. Pretty good Software that seems just limited by Googles non-official API.

It seems they are going out of business soon as the Auth API they based their business on is getting deprecated. :/ its moments like these where i hate how the web turned out.

There's also Client For Google Music (Metro app). I am pretty sure it was free when I got it, but it looks like they're charging $8 now.

That it is a Metro app can be a plus or minus. If you want it in a window, you'll have to wait for Win10 or use something like DisplayFusion.

http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/client-for-googl...

On Linux, check out Nuvola player (https://github.com/tiliado/nuvolaplayer) - it basically wraps the web UI and provides integration with global media keys / shortcuts and the underlying sound menu (in Ubuntu). As a plus, it integrates with other cloud music streaming services too.

There's also Tomahawk (https://www.tomahawk-player.org/) but I found it a bit too buggy, and unable to canonicalize songs across the streaming music providers.

I use Gear Player which works quite well: http://www.gearmusicplayer.com/

http://fluidapp.com/ ?

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