Someone built a desktop version of Google Play Music for Windows

If you like having Google Play Music — the premium music streaming service with a free ad-supported radio component — on your PC but don’t like having to run it in a browser alongside other websites, well, then, you’re in luck.

There is now a piece of open-source software that brings the modern-looking Google Play Music, featuring Google’s material design style, to the desktop on computers running Windows Vista or more recent versions of Windows. All you need is Flash. (Sorry.)

From there, you can download the .EXE file off of GitHub. The program is working well on my Surface Pro 4.

Independent Australian developer Samuel Attard first posted the software on GitHub back in July.

“I was getting fed up with searching for the one chrome tab with Google Music open or having to have the browser open just to play music,” he wrote in a Reddit post at the time. “So I made a stand alone application for Google Play Music. It also has media control support so play/pause and volumes controls work via keyboard presses (if your keyboard has those keys).”

He’s been working on it consistently since then, and late last week Attard added a few new features, like a settings window. Today people are discussing the latest version on Reddit.

If you don’t like the way the software looks, that’s okay. The source code is available for free online under an MIT open-source license, so you can freely rejigger it and make it into something that fits your own needs.

Other people have made desktop clients for older versions of Google Play Music. For people with Macs, there’s the Radiant Player. Now Windows users have a contemporary-looking option to try out.