Get FireFox to play my music! Simply!

September 5, 2006 5:54 PM

How do I get Firefox to play music media files without all the hoopla? *For myriad definitions of Hoopla, see inside.

In the beginning, Firefox played WAV and MP3 files simply, opening them up in separate tabs quickly and easily. Then along came the music programs - iTunes, WinAmp, Quicktime, etc. - and insinuated themselves into my system. Now, whenever music files come up, the aforesaid programs spawn, taking forever and making it more difficult to grab a quick listen of the things I'm interested in.

My question is this: is there some kind of extension or what-have-you that could play basic audio media files without the need to spawn myriads of resource hogs?

posted by awenner to computers & internet (5 comments total)

FoxyTunes!
posted by purephase at 6:10 PM on September 5, 2006

FoxyTunes lets you control external media players with Firefox. I believe awenner is asking how to play media on webpages with Firefox without launching an external program. I'd also like to know how to do this as I hate waiting 10 seconds for quicktime to load every time I want to listen to an mp3.
posted by null terminated at 7:10 PM on September 5, 2006

In the Downloads tab of your options dialogue, you can view and edit which actions are taken with various filetypes.

You'll also need to open your various media players and check that they aren't aggressively reclaiming file formats when they start (Winamp does this for example, by default, I think -- if it's a selected option, it will re-register the filetypes you've chosen to itself, even if another program has 'claimed' them on install, or has similar settings).

Once there is no default media player set for mp3 and wav files (ie you've unselected those filetypes in whatever apps have claimed them), Firefox will ask you what you want to do when you click on one. Tell it to open the file with Firefox itself. That should do the trick.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:18 PM on September 5, 2006

Greasemonkey + Inline music player. Puts a little link next to any mp3 and plays it using a tiny flash script. It's beautiful stuff.
posted by chrisamiller at 8:47 PM on September 5, 2006 [1 favorite has favorites]

Good stuff chrisamiller! That answers my question exactly.
posted by awenner at 12:13 AM on September 6, 2006