I wanted to be able to share playlists of music on my web site. Ideally I wouldn’t have to host the music itself but could instead point to different sources like youtube, soundcloud, ex.fm. After some research, Minilogs seemed to be the best solution.

Minilogs

The site appears to have started around Spring 2012 but it was mentioned in LifeHacker recently and has a more thorough write-up at The Next Web. It’s exactly the solution I was looking for and there doesn’t appear to be any competitors at the moment.

The quick version:

• Create playlists without registering; easy registration to embed the player
• You add songs/videos by pasting in the url
• The interface is clean and does exact what you want it to
• Support for YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Google Maps, Wikipedia, but NOT ex.fm

Embedding

To embed on your own web page: create the playlist, register, click the share option, and paste in the <iframe> markup.

The player itself looks like this:

Notice the different icons for Youtube, soundcloud and vimeo – all playing together nicely.

Here’s my first playlist – December 2012

Unsuccessful Options

Here’s a few other options that I looked at that didn’t fit the bill:

Softaculous (e.g. kplaylist) – I’m hosted on Namecheap and they have Softaculous for quick installs. Softaculous has a music category but the four options are php music library managers with out-of-date user interfaces.

CloudPlay – Looks like an interesting option for building and listening to playlists across different sources on the web, but is a desktop application.

Ex.fm – has an embedded player but it doesn’t appear that you can create custom playlists.