There are many music web apps available online. I’ve been using a few of them such as Grooveshark, mspot and Pandora. These web apps allow me to listen to music on any web-enabled devices by uploading them to the service provider’s server, streaming from my own computer or simply listening to songs already provided (and only those provided by that service provider). They work well but just lack a bit of flexibility. For users like me who prefer a simple web-based player to play all my music anywhere, Droptunes is your choice.

Droptunes serves only one function, but it meets most of my music needs. It plays my music stored in Dropbox. We know that Dropbox is probably the most popular online storage solution, and we are used to put virtually everything we may need to carry with us in it. Despite that I can click on each song to play (as long as the browser has a built-in support of playing multimedia files), choosing among songs means lots of clicks and going back and forth.

Droptunes fills this gap by providing a neat player that shows all songs in the dropbox folder and automatically plays the next song after the current song ends.

Using Droptunes is super easy, just put your songs in Dropbox, go to Droptunes and enter your dropbox user email and password. You can browse around different folders and play the music therein.

According to the author, this web app officially supports Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox and IE8+, with iOS and android devices in the pipeline. The player has two versions, flash and HTML5, so devices with low flash performance or no support to flash would find the HTML5 version useful. In fact, the HTML5 version can play more file formats (mp3, m4a, ogg and wav) while the flash version can only play mp3. Perhaps the only drawback of the HTML5 one is no buffering provided.

Another nice function is that fact that if you share your folder with your friends, your friends can also play those songs in Droptunes. Since Droptunes is basically a player shell applied on Dropbox, it is not surprising that this sharing feature enabled by Dropbox is directly usable in Droptunes.

Droptunes is available as a standard web site or you can install it as a web app via Chrome Web Store. I highly recommend it to all Google Cr-48 Chrome notebook users. By storing songs in Dropbox and using Droptunes, listening to your favourite music becames very easy.

Love and Hate

I like:

• Simple user interface
• Simple log-in process (using the Dropbox account), no settings required
• HTML5 version for available for low performance devices
• Sharing of music with friends using Dropbox

I dislike:

• No playlist creation and no random play
• Only mp3 is supported in flash version (but HTML5 version offers more)

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This is an excerpt of my web apps review blog post.

Thanks for the review. I will be giving this one a shot this weekend.

Dropbox is really becoming a must-have Cloud application for ChromeOS! Thanks for the info, I"m going to have to try it out!