Music streaming is all the hype nowadays, I feel like it’s only several years since we started abandoning CD / DVD in favor of digital streaming, but now it seems like everyone is using it. It’s not rare to find someone installing tons of music streaming service just for the sake of listening to the service’s exclusive music. Although some service provides a free or trial service, some requires you to pay upfront to enjoy their service, that’s not totally wrong since what you’ll get is a library with nearly thousands or more music.
What if you don’t have the money, or these streaming service isn’t available in your country and you still want to follow the hype ? Look no further, YouTube is here. What ? Yes, it’s our good friend YouTube. YouTube released their music streaming service (bundled with YouTube Red) but if that is also not available in your country, you can pick up AudioPocket, an app that turns YouTube into a music streaming service without paying (kind of).
Functionality & Usability
What AudioPocket does is simple, get YouTube link, get the video from the link, convert it to an audio file (.mp3) and without any magic whatsoever enables you to listen to whatever audio exists on the original video. The app also provides a rather useful tutorial in case you don’t know what you’re doing.
There’s two way you can control the audio, using the limited notification control or using the floating control (which can be accessed by clicking on the notification control), the floating control enables a wider range of control such as repeat, fast forward and rewind.
Everything so far is usable, nothing is broken or anything, until you try to play around the app. Loading history for the first time would cause some significant freeze (this only happens on the first run), the same freezing can also be encountered in some other section of the app (such as About).
I also found out that you can’t load up anything from history, it would throw up an ‘URL Error’ if you try to reuse the link from history. This seems to be caused by changes in YouTube side, I hope it could be fixed soon.
If you’re already enjoying the app itself, you can get the Premium Mode via in-app purchase, the Premium Mode unlocks the audio quality selection, full media control, and of course, ad free app.
User Interface
Okay, here’s where things gets a little bad. The user interface is trying to be Material, but it misses it by an inch… not really, it misses things a lot. It looks unpolished and some elements are out of places (and could be improved). I’ll let the screenshot do the talking.
AudioPocket is still on a beta phase, though, so I think they’ll fix it up when the final release has been rolled out, if not, I can just stay here and complain ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Conclusion
It’s fine, it’s a nice alternative to music streaming service but it also looks and feels unpolished, these could be fixed when the app has matured to a more improved version, which I hope would be soon (the app last update was January, so it has been three months since the last update).100th post
Sign up here with your email
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon