New music player for YouTube

Most of us are likely very familiar with YouTube, the online video hosting and sharing service that lets anyone upload videos for a global audience. The site hosts a wide range of video content — from major motion-picture trailers to that guy down the street who films his own puppet shows.

Among YouTube's massive catalogue lies a myriad of music videos, live musical performances and other audio recordings that have been captured on video or converted to the Flash video format. You can watch and listen to historical footage of great blues musicians like Robert Johnson or the latest Top 40 music videos, and now you can do it in a stand-alone music player specifically built to listen to audio from YouTube.

Muziic is a music player and converter developed by the son-and-father team of David and Mark Nelson. Fifteen-year-old David is the technical lead, having developed the actual software.

Muziic lets you create playlists of streaming audio files from YouTube as well as convert your own audio files for submission to the site. According to the creators, Muziic adheres to the YouTube terms of use (which is why it includes a little video player), but not everyone is so sure about that.

The Muziic Player looks slick yet leaves a heavy system footprint.
(Credit: CBS Interactive)

After you install and start Muziic, it might hang a little as it connects with the YouTube server. Then you'll see a list of genres like Alternative, Classical, etc in the left-hand column and a list of random tracks in the main window. A search box above the main window lets you search for any artist, song or keyword, while the left-hand window lets you browse genres by YouTube user. Clicking on any user will list tracks in the main window.

To start listening to music, click the plus sign next to any of the available songs in the main window to add them to your playlist. A basic set of player controls — play, pause, stop, next track and previous track — sits in the upper left-hand corner, and the tiny video player mentioned above rests directly to its right. A full-screen button lets you expand the video if you so choose.

The playlist controls are placed in the top-right corner of the interface. When you click on the plus sign next to any song, it will immediately be placed into this playlist. You can save and load playlists for later listening and a "Clear Playlist" button lets you start all over.

The Muziic Player looks slick and works fairly well, but it does use quite a bit of system memory, akin to Mozilla Firefox with many tabs open. I also found that while listening to an active playlist in Muziic, browsing the internet via Firefox or any other browser slowed down considerably.

The stand-alone Muziic Encoder is a nice bonus. The simple tool lets you select an image (for the video) and an MP3 file, then it creates a formatted video version of your song that you can upload to YouTube directly from the Muziic interface.

For more about Muziic, read Greg Sandoval's report on CNET News. Better yet, give it a try and tell us what you think in the comments.