“Yawn – yet another music player?” might be your first reaction at the sight of yet-another media player gracing the pages of OMG! Ubuntu, but this one is actually rather special.

The HTML5-written media player runs in the browser (so what?) but is designed to play back your local media (oooh!): your entire music library can be added and played through it (super neat).

Player is a HTML5 browser based media player
Searching my local media through browser-based 'Player'

The player can even be saved and used ‘offline’ – just hit CTRL+S and move the resulting files somewhere safe. Then open the ‘MP3 player.html’ file in a browser of your choice.

If you’re on a system with limited resources and just want to play music then ‘player’ isn’t that bad a choice for despite it being a media player it uses less resources (as a tab) than a dedicated app like Banshee.

Features

The list of what Player doesn’t do is, somewhat obviously, longer than what it does.

There’s no scrobble support, tag editing or artwork display. You won’t find an equaliser, gapless playback or generative playlists either. It also noticed a lack of support for non-English track names. Whether this is a Chrome issue or a Player one, I’m not sure.

But you can search your library once its added, easily add tracks to the ‘play queue’ with a click and turn on a ‘shuffle’ mode.

It’s novel, for sure, but is also rather cool.

Try it out @ antimatter15.github.com/player/player.html

Bailey via Tip Form

music