WinGrooves, Grooveshark Desktop Player

Grooveshark is pretty awesome, which can mostly be attributed to the fact that the service can be used without registering an account first. That's rare on today's Internet. Grooveshark is a web application that you can use to find and play music. You can use it to discover new music, tune into genre based radio stations and check out what's popular in general. Registered users get extra features like the ability to save playlists.

One thing that you cannot do with Grooveshark is to control the music player with your keyboard's media keys. If you want to skip a song you need to go to the web page and do that.

That's where the Windows desktop player WinGrooves comes into play. It basically is a 1:1 copy of Grooveshark in your web browser, with the benefit that it fully supports keyboard media keys and customizable hot keys that work everywhere.

The program seems to be using the Internet Explorer rendering engine (correct me if I'm wrong). Adobe Flash needs to be installed on the system as well.

Wingrooves displays the standard Grooveshark layout after it has been started. Users can use the search to find a song, tune into one of the stations or log into their Grooveshark account to access their personal music collection or playlists. Groveshark ads are displayed in the application which is remarkable, considering that this is the main source of revenue of the service. Members who pay a small fee can remove the advertisements to support the service further.

You can then minimize the application and music will continue playing in the background. A click on the options button in the main interface displays all hotkeys that are configured. They all make use of Ctrl-Alt and another key and can be changed in the menu in case you like to use different keys.

Users with media keys can ignore those keys outright and use the media keys on their keyboard instead.

WinGrooves is only available for the Microsoft Windows operating system. No additional compatibility information are provided. It looks as if the program requires the Microsoft .NET Framework to be installed, but it is not clear which version it requires.

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