Thanks to the amazing and ever expanding collection of extensions in the Chrome web store, Chrome has now become one of the most versatile web browsers. I definitely suspect it to be a part of Google’s world domination plans, but for the time being lets just keep that aside.
The Chrome web store now houses more than thousands of free extensions, which range from simple productivity tools to games and much more. With the help of all these extensions, Chrome has evolved into more of an swiss army knife amongst its competitor web browsers. Install the appropriate extension and Google chrome can simultaneously play many roles such as a instant messenger, feed reader, your daily expense calculator and the list just goes on. With all these features, Google chrome is definitely heading towards replacing your desktop experience.
For those who want to access streaming music from the ease of their web browser, Streamus is an extension for Chrome that will let you stream and play music from YouTube. Since all the videos on YouTube are legally available for free viewing, you will be listening to legally free music and at the same time you don’t need to worry about the storage space. With an extension like this, paid music services such as Spotify are going to take a big hit.
Using Streamus is very simple, just install the extension from this link and when its done, the Streamus icon will appear on Google chrome’s extension bar. there are two ways to search and play music with Streamus.
You can type “streamus” into the URL address followed by a space and then type the name of the song. Instantly a list of the songs with the matching keyword will appear. click on a song and within few seconds the song will start playing. Here’s what it looks like.
Secondly you can click on the Streamus icon on the extension bar and search for a song in the search bar provided. once the list of song appears, click on any of them to play it in Google chrome.
You can even create a music playlist comprising of your favorite tracks, simply select a tracks from the search list and click on Save selected. Next type in a name for the playlist or simply select from an existing playlist to add the new track to.
In case you want to find similar artists related to the songs in your playlist, you can use the radio button to do that.
Although Streamus is still in beta, it is actually a pretty simple and good extension. you wont have any problem finding the exact music track you are looking for, but once in a while you might stumble upon a user recorded version of a song. Overall Streamus provides a hassle free method listening to YouTube videos, sans the video, which actually saves you a lot of bandwidth. Do give it a try and let us know what’s your opinion on it. If you have faced any problems or if you want to ask a few questions to the developer, head over to this Reddit thread.
Once correction, the developer says that the whole video is actually downloaded in the background and not just the audio.