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"The social music revolution, spanning from the days of Napster to the prevalence of streaming music, has brought us applications ranging from iTunes to Last.fm, providing us with better ways to access our favorite music cheaper (and just as important, without pirating).  Of course, it's not all free - iTunes songs have a cost and even apps like Pandora have a fee after so many hours of use.\nThus, we were intrigued when a new app, moof, was brought to our attention.  Moof's acronym explains the app for itself: music, online, on-demand, for free.  The tool works like iTunes, but on the web - thus why it claims to have \"all the functionality of a full desktop media player, in your browser.\"  So what is moof?  How does it find on-demand music for free?  And most of all, does it live up to its own lofty rhetoric?\nMoof: One Part iTunes, One Part YouTube\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLet's analyze the moof acronym (music, online, on-demand, for free), because I believe it's important to understand how the company fulfills each part of it in order to create a total social music experience.\nMusic, online: The player is simple and functional - it pulls music from the web (I'll tell you where from in a moment) and allows you to play it, create a music library, and build user playlists.  Perhaps most important, moof has an option to import your existing xml music libraries, though the feature doesn't work correctly all the time (I had trouble uploading my massive iTunes library).  \nTheir claim that it has all of the functionality of a full desktop media player is not true, though. On my iTunes, I have access to far more detailed information (ratings, view counts, track numbers, etc), additional playback features (fades, shuffle, etc.), and more complete playlist management.  But as a pure music player, moof has everything you need to simply enjoy music.  \nIt is actually one of the best web-based music players we've come across.\nOn-demand, for free: Any song, anytime?  How does moof accomplish this feat?  The answer's actually somewhat disappointing: YouTube.  Moof gets the music you request by connecting to YouTube and taking music videos from the world's most popular online video website.  The bottom-left of the player even has the corresponding video playing, which isn't a bad touch.\nHowever, getting your music from YouTube has its issues - ones that definitely diminish its usefulness as a full music player.  The biggest problem is noise.  Try searching for \"Kanye West, I Wonder\"  and then sift through the dozens of live recordings, remixes, and user-generated videos until you find the original song.  I had to stumble across a Runescape music video before I finally found the song.\nIt's shocking how much music is on YouTube actually, but that also causes a lot of noise.  Eventually you could sift through it all, hand-pick out the songs you want, and have a fully portable music player, but it takes time and it doesn't guarantee the YouTube video will not be taken down.  The quality of the music could also be an issue for those of us who are audiophiles.\nWhat's the assessment?\n\n\n\n\nI'm going to summarize this with the great, the good, and the bad:\nThe Great: Your music library, portable anywhere you go.  Even an iPod cannot hold the amount of music that moof accesses via YouTube.\nThe Good: As a web music player, moof is solid, if not revolutionary.\nThe Bad: The noise associated with pulling music from YouTube.  Last.fm and Pandora are more reliable and have far less noise because they stream actual songs from the artists, rather than music videos.\nProbably its most direct competitor is Grooveshark, the online music search engine and jukebox.  Grooveshark does almost all of the same things - find music, play music, create playlists, and even follow the music playlists of other friends.  And while moof is a strong product on its own, it still doesn't beat its older and feature-rich competitor.\nWe believe moof is a great product and look forward to future innovations, but we're unconvinced that it provides functionality that makes it novel or unique from its many competitors.  Hopefully they'll find ways to surprise us."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2009/07/19/moof/>