Muziic is a music-on-demand app, but unlike services from Grooveshark, Mog, and most other mainstream music apps, Muziic doesn’t maintain its own music servers. Instead Muziic grabs audio from YouTube.
Here’s how it works. You enter an artist name or song title and Muziic searches YouTube. You can then either add the track to your playlist or tap the title to start playing the song. A new window opens with a still image from the YouTube video and the song will start to play. You can skip tracks or view progress on a timeline, but I didn’t find an easy way to fast forward or rewind within a song.
Muziic has an iPhone app, and this week the company also launched an Android version. Unlike the iOS version, the Android app requires Adobe Flash Player 10.1 to work.
For the most part the two apps work similarly, with featured tracks, internet radio, albums, and playlists on the front screen, as well as a search bar. For some reason the iOS version features a list of these items though, while there are large square icons in the Android app.
Muziic has no problems playing music in the background, as you’d expect from an Android app. Just start up a song or playlist and then hit the Home button to exit the app without closing it. But there doesn’t seem to be a simple way to search for tracks in Muziic while continuing to listen to songs in the background. When you go to the main page, the music instantly stops.
In other words, the app is quirky. But the upshot is that you can listen to almost any song on YouTube any time you like. On the other hand, YouTube is choc full of remixes, covers, and live performances. So when you search for the Beastie Boys, don’t be surprised if you occasionally wind up with a bunch of frat boys belting out karaoke covers.
Muziic is available as a free download from the Android Market.
