The search for the perfect player continues. Many services have advanced in developing their web versions to offload most of their functions onto the browser, which in turn stimulates the creation of applications aimed at unifying several platforms. MellowPlayer is one of them. In addition to working on the three main operating systems, it has a pleasant and easy-to-use interface, but it suffers some technical limitations that will have to be corrected one way or another in the future.
Spotify, YouTube, Tidal, Soundcloud, Google Play Music, Deezer... Honestly, audio streaming has competition in abundance. Some services manage to join forces with certain artists and turn them into "exclusives," but that advantage is usually temporary. Personally, I don't know many users who access several services simultaneously, and in general they divide their music "consumption" between Spotify and YouTube. Now, a question: Is there a way to concentrate all those platforms under a single program? From a technical point of view, any browser can do it, but its interfaces are optimized for other tasks. That leaves us at the gates of MellowPlayer.
MellowPlayer is presented as an application that "integrates cloud music" on the desktop, i.e., essentially a kind of wrapper. MellowPlayer has an interface that displays its compatible services in a format very similar to what we can see in any speed dial. Once we click, the program sends us to the web version of each service. At this point anyone would ask: "what difference is there with a normal browser?" Well, the most important one is probably the existence of a playback control in the top right, and a wide repertoire of keyboard shortcuts. Its desktop theme adapts to the active service, and in the configuration section there are many more options to change the appearance.
So... what is missing? MellowPlayer is compatible with Windows, Linux, and OS X. Some services need Flash (Tidal is one), so its installer will add a copy to the operating system. The problem is that other services require proprietary codecs, and the QtWebEngine version in MellowPlayer does not have them. In other words, the user will be forced to recompile with those codecs integrated. The collaborators are exploring different ways to remove that restriction. Until that happens, MellowPlayer requires a bit of patience...
