NowPlayingChords (2026)
Chrome and Firefox extension that, while listening to music on Spotify Web, detects the song and shows a button to search its chords/tabs across several sites at once.
NowPlayingChords (2026)
Browser extension (Chrome and Firefox) that, while listening to music on open.spotify.com, detects the artist and song currently playing and shows a button on the playback bar that opens a panel with several guitar chord/tab search sites.
Available on the Chrome Web Store.
How does it work?
While listening to a song on open.spotify.com, a "Search Chords" button appears right next to the volume control on the playback bar, without invading the rest of the Spotify interface.
Clicking it opens a small panel with the configured search sites — not just Ultimate Guitar. Each site shows an indicator of whether it has results for the current song, so at a glance you know which site is worth visiting instead of blindly opening a search that might have no results.
Smart chord search
Every time the panel is opened, the extension checks in the background (from the background script, to avoid Spotify's page CSP) whether each enabled site has results for the current song:
- ✅ Has results: clickable row, opens the search in a new tab.
- ❌ No results (or failed/timed-out check): disabled row, no link.
- ❓: unverifiable site (behind anti-bot protection), always clickable so the user can check manually.
Each check is a heuristic over each site's HTML — these are third-party sites that can change their design at any time and break detection. That's why any error or timeout is conservatively treated as "no results", so as to never offer a link that probably won't work.
Results are stored in browser.storage.local for 30 days per song, so reopening the panel for the same song —even days later or in another tab— won't trigger new network requests until the cache expires.
Options page
The extension has its own settings page, accessible by clicking the extension's icon in the browser toolbar or the "⚙ Settings" button in the search panel. It lets you enable or disable which sites appear in the search panel.
Supported search sites
The list is configurable from the code by adding new entries with their identifier, name and URL template. If you'd like another site added to the list, let me know and I'll look into adding it.
Cifra Club, Chordify and E-Chords are not verified automatically: their pages sit behind anti-bot protection (Cloudflare) that blocks any "cold" request without prior session cookies — exactly the situation of a request from the background script. That's why they're always shown as clickable with the ❓ icon, without being verified.
Languages
The extension is available in Catalan, English and Spanish, via the native WebExtensions internationalization API. There's no manual selector: the browser's language is used automatically, with English as the default if the browser isn't in any of the three.
Tech stack
- Manifest V3, shared between Chrome and Firefox
- WebExtensions API (background script with
host_permissionsto bypass CORS) browser.storage.localfor the result cache and user preferences- Vanilla JavaScript, no dependencies
Technologies
Achievements
- Real-time detection of the artist and song on open.spotify.com without invading Spotify's UI
- Background check of 7 chord-search sites, with a ✅/❌/❓ indicator for each
- 30-day result cache per song, avoiding repeated network requests
- Extension available in Catalan, English and Spanish via the native internationalization API