The first method is a search that can be used to find exact matches for artists, songs, albums and so on. Youtube has one of the largest collections of music videos and it usually is pretty easy to find the music that you are looking for. Music that has been discovered can be added to playlists which can be saved after a free account registration at the official website. This is a great way of creating lots of playlists that cover all the songs and genres that the user likes.

The second option that is offered by Muziic is pre-generated playlists that can be accessed from the sidebar of the music player. Those playlists are sorted by genre. About 30 or so genres are available which do contain one or multiple playlists that can be selected for playback.

The video going along with the song can be displayed in the music player if that is something that the user wants to view as well while listening to the song. Besides the playlists that are offered users can import so called channels that have been created by other Muziic users into the application. Channels are also categorized in genres making it easy to pick a suitable one.

The music player is quite interesting as it uses a concept similar to cloud computing to provide access to a large collection of music to users. Users benefit from this by being able to search and access that large database and by saving disk space as virtually no local disk space is required. The only possible drawbacks are the quality of the songs which are definitely not high (but acceptable) quality and the chance that songs vanish if the videos get deleted on Youtube.

The result is pretty amazing. The complete discography of many artists are shown on the results page. All albums and songs can be played right on the website without additional plugins or registration hassles.

Users who want to listen to music online can enter a band or artist name in the search form or pick one of the suggestions in the tag cloud below. It takes only a few seconds before the next page is loaded containing information about the discography of the selected band or artist. The first song of one of the music albums will play automatically.

The results are spot on. Even the tested live albums did return the live songs (most of the times) and not other studio versions of the songs. All songs were playing fine during tests, there was no delay or any other sort of disturbance. The page with the music player uses several ads which might be distracting to some users. It provides the means to purchase songs at Amazon. There are also some concert information listed on some pages.

Vastfm is a unique interesting website that provides access to virtually any band and song that can be found on Youtube.

It surprised me that they decided to offer 20 Metallica live albums from 1982-2003 for free on their website Live Metallica which is selling live albums from their recent concerts as mp3 and flac on the site as well. Well the 20 albums are free to download after registering at the website which just takes an email and password.

Don’t expect the downloads to be that easy. They are offering a Java download manager or single downloads of the files. Single downloads mean that a user would have to right-click files about two hundreds times to download all of them. Most live albums have a playing time between 1:30 and 2 hours and mostly contain classic Metallica songs. All test downloads used a bitrate of 192 Kbit.

A nice surprise for Metallica fans, past and present.

The covers are downloaded into a subdirectory of the Harmony root folder. That folder hat a size of more than 15 Megabytes after the first run on my computer containing cover artwork for more than 450 music albums. As I said earlier the music that is displayed is directly connected to iTunes. Harmony recognizes new albums and deleted ones and downloads cover art for the new and removes cover art for the old ones.

Once the album art has been downloaded the user can navigate through is record collection by flipping through them with the mouse or entering a search term in the search box at the top of Harmony. Music can be added to the playlist or played immediately, albums can be flipped through while playing music.

Harmony looks great but lacks several features that I like in a music player. Playlists can’t be saved, there is no volume control or settings at all which is probably the biggest problem. Harmony does not play .aac or .m4a songs by default but a plugin is available that adds support for those two formats.

Pennywise is the latest band to release a music album for free. Their album Reason to Believe is available at Myspace at a bitrate of 320 kbit/s including the pdf booklet and jpg cover. All that needs to be done is to add the user Textango as a friend at Myspace who will send a message that includes the download link. The music is DRM free.

Textango seems to be a mobile music distributor according to Wikipedia. Pennywise is a Punk-Rock band in case you have not heard of them before, comparable to Bad Religion in many aspects.

The album Reason to Believe will also be sold in stores in Europe and America.

Audiobaba is a new service that I have not heard of before. You begin be entering either a song title, album or artist in the search field. This is normally a artist that you know and like. All results that match the keywords that you have entered are then shown on the next page. You can then listen to samples from all songs that have been found. The samples are usually between 20 seconds and 1 minute.

Once you have found the song that you have been looking for you can click on the “match” button which searches the database of songs again for matches, that is songs and artists that sound similar to the selection that you have made. One of my favorite songs of all time is Vincent by Don McLean and Audiobaba gave me more than 40 matches of songs. Some of them did fit very well with the overall theme of the song Vincent and some did not.

It is however very easy to distinguish between those songs, just listen to them and give them a thumbs down if you think they do not match or bookmark them for alter reference. Bookmarking them means that they are added to a personal page at Audiobaba. You might be wondering how they find out if two songs are similar to each other, here is their answer:

Audiobaba is powered by a complex artificial intelligence and years of academic research on sound and music. Our computer algorithms ‘listen’ to music and compare it for multitudes (we can’t tell you the exact number but its over 70) of acoustic qualities like beats, rhythm, and all that jazz.

It would be more than interesting to get more opinions on the success rate of that algorithm. If you did use the service, did the recommended songs match the one that you entered ?

All music available at Jamendo was released under Creative Commons which means that you may download, remix and share the music freely without the fear of being sued. Jamendo offers a tag cloud which can be used for navigation which seems to have roughly 100 different genres from 17sonrecord to zen. The most popular ones seem to be electronica and rock. Alternatively you may navigate Jamendo by artists or albums.

I think it is pretty nice that all albums have cover art and a genre connected to them. Clicking on an album loads a website filled with information and options. You may listen online to all the tracks (mp3 or ogg), download the full album using bittorrent or emule, spread the album using your website, write and read reviews, buy the album from the artist, donate to the artist, find out about similar artists and rate the album.

You may create podcasts or m3u (winamp playlists) while listening to one or more of the tracks of a certain album. Online quality of the songs is not that great but sufficient for judging the song. Downloads are encoded with roughly 200 Kbps (mp3) and 300 Kbps (ogg).

Jamendo rocks. Oh, you will have to create an account before you can use most of their services. It is free, takes only a couple of seconds.