Let’s say you are working on something (like a Word document) and would also like to play one of your favorite songs in the background. You don’t have that song in your local iTunes library but it’s most definitely available on YouTube.

So how do you play that song on your desktop?

One option is that you launch your web browser, open the site YouTube.com, type the title of the song in the search box and then click on one of the search results to play that song.

The other hassle-free alternative that you may find more handy is Quisple.

Quisple is a compact Windows utility that lets you play music from YouTube directly on your desktop without even having to launch the browser. Just type the song name in the Quisple player and it will instantly stream the corresponding song from YouTube.

Internally, Quisple uses the Google APIs to search for that song on YouTube and automatically plays the first search result.  It doesn’t convert the YouTube video to an audio file but only hides the video portion during playback.

Pavel Kounitsky, the developer of Quisple, says that a new version should be available soon. I really like the simplicity of this app though I wish there were an option to play songs in a loop as well as support for video playlists.