Anyone tried this yet?

Teen creates program that delivers YouTube tunes to your desktop

By Gillian Shaw,
Canwest News Service
March 10, 2009 10:02 AM

A 15-year-old American developer has hit on a way to deliver millions of music tracks from YouTube to a personal music player on computer desktops.

With the help of his father, Mark Nelson, teen David Nelson has launched an online application that delivers music using an interface a little like that of iTunes, but this one taps into the vast library of YouTube to fill personalized playlists.

The service has taken off to such an extent that the younger Nelson reports he had to trade public school attendance for an online education to keep up the pace.

"Although we don't generate exact figures every day, we're above 300,000 downloads," David Nelson said in an e-mail interview.

The barely launched Muziic website was so overrun by music aficionadas keen to take advantage of a free service that lets them find and organize YouTube music that its server crashed temporarily with the weight of the traffic.

"... within less than a week of our "unofficial" launch, we have been "over abundantly" blessed with huge amounts of traffic!" the Muziic blog read.

"It's really the first 100-per-cent free, legal method for listening to digital music," David Nelson, Muziic's chief technology officer and co-founder said in a release announcing the service. "Typically, free music services are not completely legal; on the other hand, legal music services are not usually free. My dad and I set out to create Muziic, the music service that is both free and legal."

So far, Nelson said he hasn't had negative feedback from either YouTube or the music labels.

"We have not yet heard from YouTube or the labels, but there's no indication our site will be limited in usage," Nelson said in his e-mail response to The Vancouver Sun.

Visitors to http://www.muziic.com can download the Muziic player and from there, find tracks either by searching for artists, titles or keywords or by browsing through the various categories from soft rock to indie to pop, alternative and others. The service only works with Windows XP or Vista operating systems.

Peter Vogel, a physics teacher and head of Information and Communications Technology at Notre Dame regional secondary school said in an e-mail that he has been trying out the service and sent an e-mail to his students to see what they think of it.

Vogel terms it "revolutionary" and possibly the North American answer to Spotify, the number one music service in the United Kingdom and some other European countries that delivers free music but is not available in Canada, the U.S. or many other parts of the world.

"It's quite an amazing app that plugs into YouTube," Vogel said in an e-mail.

While the service is attracting widespread attention online, Vogel points out that: "Some of that will be interest from lawyers.

"Either Muziic will last the week or it will be shut down because YouTube/Google pulls the plug on the API, the application program interface that makes it possible for the developers who created Muziic to get files from YouTube into their player."

Representatives of Google, which owns YouTube and YouTube didn't respond to requests for an interview.

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