Freemake Music Box: Audio player with YouTube integration

If you are looking for a particular song that you want to listen to, then it is usually a good idea to pay a visit to YouTube as the chance is quite good that it will be available there in various versions. YouTube is without doubt one of the biggest music repositories on the Internet.

Several record companies, publishers and artists have realized the site's importance and popularity and have started to take advantage of it by uploading music videos to the site. That's however only a fraction of what is available, as users from all over the world have also uploaded live recordings and other recordings to the site.

Freemake Music Box

Freemake Music Box is a new free application that is on first glance a local audio player and not really special by any means. When you do notice that it taps right into YouTube's vast music archive, you are likely to change your mind about it though.

The integration is well done. All you have to do is enter a partial band, song or album name to get suggestions displayed to you right away that are usually up to the point.

A tap on the enter key or a click on search displays the first search results, each displaying the name of the artist, album and song, and the song's play time. You can click on the play button right away to stream the song to your computer to listen to it, or on the plus icon to add it to one of your playlists instead.

Another interesting option is to switch from the track listing to an album or artist listing instead to change the search results. The album listing enables you for instance to add a complete album to your playlist, while the artists listing will play songs from the artist non-stop regardless of album.

You can create multiple playlists and even mix local and remote files in them. The program can play popular audio formats such as mp3, wma, flac or w4a out of the box and import individual songs or local playlists that you have created in other applications (for instance in .pls format).

Music Box displays the YouTube video that goes along with the song in its interface by default. You can hide that if you do not want to display it.

The player options are basic but sufficient. You can pause playback, skip a song or go back one, change the volume, jump to a specific part, or enable shuffle and repeat modes.

Freemake plans to add additional features to the application. This includes mobile versions, integration of top music charts, and playlist synchronization.

Verdict

What I like most about Music Box is that it provides me with access to album and artists searches. Especially the album search is great as you can quickly add a full album to the playlist to play it in the music player. The suggestions are also excellent most of the time. Sometimes though it may not find a song you are looking for, but when you search only for the band or album, it is suddenly displayed in the search results.