Ex.FM Music Discovery Service With A Twist

Update: Ex.fm is no longer available and there does not seem to be an alternative available that replicates its functionality.

Most music discovery services let you only play music that they host on their own servers.

That's great and all but may be limiting at times depending on agreements with various rights holders and companies.

Ex.FM offers a solution. The web service at its core is still a music discovery service, with the difference that it will pick up music that you find on third party sites as long as you have one of its browser extensions installed.

Lets take a closer look at how this works. The extension, available for the Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome web browser picks up mp3 files automatically that you happen to stumble upon on the Internet.

This is automatic, and a player is displayed at the bottom of the browser window to play those songs directly on the page. Registered users get the additional benefit that discovered music is saved so that they can open it at anytime on the Ex.FM website.

The service works well with popular music sites such as Bandcamp, Soundcloud, the Live Music Archive or music blogs hosted on Tumblr. Songs are picked up automatically even if you do not play the songs on the site. They are then sorted automatically by site > artist and album on the Exfm website.

You can click on the extension icon to bring up the current music queue that offers all the options you would expect from a music player (back, forward, pause, stop volume).

If you do not want to look for music by yourself, you can use the trending listing and explore options on the site to get your daily music fix.

Trending displays the top 20 tracks of the last 24 hours on Ex.FM.

The explore section on the site offers several options:

• Site of the day - A new site every day that posts publicly accessible mp3 music.
• Genres - Pick a genre and get a selection of music that other users have found.
• Featured Album - A favorite editor picked album of the day.
• Tastemakers - Music discovered by popular Ex.FM members is posted here.
• Monthly Mixtape - A hand picked mixtape that changes monthly.
• Latest loved - Realtime music discovery, again from other users of the site.

The extensions are not needed to use the service. You can visit the service to access both the trending and explore sections of the site.

If you like to discover new music, or are simply looking for a versatile web music player that picks up songs that you find on web pages automatically, then you should take a closer look at Exfm. And since it is all about direct mp3 links, you won't encounter country restrictions like you would with other services or players. Thumbs up!