Muziic Player 2.01

Originally conceived as an alternative to Spotify, Muziic is a music-on-demand application that, apart from streaming online media, now allows playback of audio and media files stored on our computer. Muziic basically works as a streaming service that has YouTube as its source of music, which implies there are millions of songs to listen for free.

Searching for music is practically the same as in Spotify: we type in the name of a song or artist, and the program will retrieve the results. It can browse the whole site, and now it can also narrow the search to playlists and channels. One of the application’s weaknesses becomes evident here though, as we cannot perform advanced searches, nor arrange the results retrieved in any way. That is, it will show a list of similar songs, with studio and live versions mixed up, and finding the one we want turns out a bit complicated. Like Spotify, Muziic allows us to create playlists combining our favorite songs (local files too) and videos, to share with friends over social networks, and also submit them to Muziic servers. An extra tool included in the program is the encoder, which, in theory, allows us to create an FLV video from a picture and an MP3 file and upload it to YouTube directly from the program (I tried creating one but it did not work).

Probably the most obvious disadvantage of the service is that the sound quality is not always great, as it will depend on the quality of the video, and this is something that may disappoint more demanding users.

Among the several improvements and additions of this new release, Muziic now offers access to hundreds of radio stations organized in a special section. Other new features are the chat room, automatic updates to Twitter, search suggestions while typing, fullscreen mode, and more. Creating an account on the site enables extra options like using the chatroom, or joining the Muziic community, though it is not strictly necessary to sign up to use the program.