MusicTube Review - Use YouTube as Your Source of Music

very good
key review info
application features
  • Lots of songs
  • (3 more, see all...)

MusicTube is a very interesting music player designed for multiple platforms using YouTube as the music source. It's not made for locally hosted music, and you can't add other online sources, but YouTube is a huge resource.

Music players are a dime a dozen on the Linux platform, and many of them support online sources. You can usually listen to locally hosted music, online radios, or online music platforms, like Spotify for example. Everything can usually be found under the same roof, and lots of applications are capable of performing these tasks.

There is also another type of music players that have started to show up in the past couple of years and that play music exclusively from online sources. Tomahawk is a good example and it's defined as a cloud player. MusicTube can also be categorized as a cloud player, but it has only one source for the music, the YouTube platform. This makes it rather unique.

Installation

I installed MusicTube in Ubuntu 15.04, and you can find the DEB files on the official website or on Softpedia. From what I can tell, only Ubuntu or Debian system are supported, and only DEB files are provided, but it doesn't mean that you won't find it in your local repositories. It's worth mentioning that MusicTube is a commercial application, and it costs €9, but it might be different depending on your location. The only reason might be that the developer knows what he has and that there isn't any real competition in this niche.

Usage

The application doesn't have any weird dependencies, so pretty much anyone can use it. There are some restrictions if you use it without paying, like the number of songs in the playlist (just 50), but it shouldn't be an inconvenient if you just want to test it.

The fact that it uses YouTube is actually an incredibly good idea. It's probably a bigger source of music than many online platforms and you don't need to pay monthly subscriptions to other services (except for the price you need to pay for MusicTube). It's likely that you'll find pretty much anything you want, cover or live, and not only music is supported.

The main window of the application has main tabs. The first hosts the Search function, the second list the results, the third one is Info and it shows details about what is playing, and the forth one is Versions, which also display details about the loaded videos. The right side of the apps is occupied by a simple playlist; that gives easy access to the songs.

Functions like shuffle, scrubbing, repeat, and a few others are also available. Some simple social options for Twitter, Facebook and Google, are available in the main menus if you want to share what you're listening to, and you can also copy the link of a particular song. Also, you can watch the video of the song in question, and you can even make it go full screen.


The Good

The vast number of songs on YouTube should make this app a no-brainer. The fact that it has a little button in the top right corner that forces the application to look for a Live version of the song is really cool. Moreover, being able to disable and enable the video is a nice touch.

The Bad

The interface is not as responsive as it should be, and it misses some features. For example, it would be nice if you could add a specific playlist to the player, without having to search for it.

Conclusion

MusicTube is a commercial application, and that might be a problem for some users, but it provides an interesting service by making the access trivial to the biggest database of songs on the planet. That's got to be worth €9.

user interface 4
features 4
ease of use 5
pricing / value 4


final rating 4
Editor's review
very good
 
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MusicTube (5 Images)

MusicTube in action
MusicTube in actionMusicTube in actionMusicTube in actionMusicTube in action