In addition to FoxyTunes features to control music through a toolbar on a web browser, FoxyTunes 2.0 for Internet Explorer now has a Mini Desktop widget that can connect to it.

The skinny on FoxyTunes is that they also have custom skins.  There are 11 total available as of right now.  Since FoxyTunes has new skin colors, what better way to show that they’re univesal than by supporting different languages.

FoxyTunes 2.0 for Internet Explorer also has 30 new languages connected.  This includes Bulgarian, Czech, German, and Spanish.  FoxyTunes created a Firefox 3 compatible plugin for Mozilla’s upcoming release.

And lastly, FoxyTunes now supports timer and alarm clock features in Internet Explorer.  Beforehand, this feature was only possible using the FoxyTunes plugin for Firefox.  FoxyTunes users can set any of the songs on their hard drive as the song that they want to wake up to as long as the browser and computer is on while going to bed.

FoxyTunes is one of my most favorite plugins for IE and Firefox.  I use it everyday.  I definitely recommend getting it.

Yahoo! acquired FoxyTunes because the company shares a vision of “Universality and Openness.”  FoxyTunes will be expected to support other music players and additional music web sites.  FoxyTunes also has a Signatures feature that shows the track that is currently playing when signing emails or writing blog posts.

Alex and Vitaly Sirota started FoxyTunes a few years ago and raised seed capital to keep the project going.  The official acquisition announcement was made on the Yahoo! Music Blog and the FoxyTunes blog.

This announcement comes in the midst of Microsoft’s offer to acquire Yahoo! for close to $45 billion.    I first wrote about FoxyTunes in January 2007.

And in case you were wondering, FoxyTunes isn’t just an alarm clock built-in to a browser.  The primary purpose of FoxyTunes is so that you don’t have to minimize your Internet browser to switch songs on your media player.  With the FoxyTunes toolbar, you can display the song title that is playing, control your media player functions including volume, and even move the toolbar anywhere in the browser.

The media players that FoxyTunes supports include Apollo, foobar, iTunes, J. River, JetAudio, MediaMonkey, MusicMatch, musikcube, Pandora, Quintessential, RealPlayer, Rhapsody, Sonique, The Core, Winamp, Windows Media Player, wxMusik, XBox Media Player, XMPlay, and Yahoo Music Engine.  I have a huge music library and find myself toggling between songs a lot.  Ultimately, this toolbar will help me save time substantially.

FoxyTunes was created by Alex Sirota.  FoxyTunes Planet is an upcoming service that will integrate FoxyTunes services with related music information from sources, Amazon and Wikipedia.

Here is a screen shot of the toolbar in action: