MusicBox Review: Music from Anywhere

Sites like YouTube provide tons of video for watching on the Internet. There are also many songs there too, with no real video attached. Sometimes you do want the whole video, but sometimes you just want the audio: Like for a song. One tool that was just recently released for that exact purpose is MusicBox.

MusicBox acts a lot like it’s brother product, VideoBox. You just drag a URL onto the window and choose the format and where to save. This would make sense because they are related products. So, once you are at the page you would like to download audio from, just drag the URL from your web browser of choice into MusicBox. It will then attempt to find audio on that page to download. If it doesn’t, though, it will prompt you with a WebKit view where you can press play, and then it will know what to do.

There is more than one way to choose a URL. MusicBox includes a Safari plugin that allows for one-click downloading. Just go to a URL, click the toolbar item, and you’re all set. To instal this go to MusicBox>Install Safari Plugin. The plugin even works with Safari 4 BETA.

MusicBox gives you a few formats to output the audio to. You can choose from raw, wav, mp3 and mp4, and also choose a bit rate (for all but raw). You can also choose to use the input file’s settings so no extra space is used for increasing quality that cannot be increased.

I do have a few gripes with MusicBox too. The main window shows a white-to-orange gradient with white text on it, which can be a bit hard to see, and looks a little funny. Also, one of the output options is mp4, but since MusicBox is only for audio, there is no reason to optput to a video format. Instead of mp4, m4a (AAC) should be included for maximum iTunes compatibility (or just for wanting all your songs in the same format). And one last thing is more of a warning that in issue. If you use any WebKit plugins to block flash video unless you click on it, you will usually have to play the clip for MusicBox because, well, the clip is being blocked.

MusicBox, by Tasty Apps retails for $15 and you can download a free trial from their site. It makes downloading music from the Internet very easy“You can do it in really only 2 steps. However, it is mostly for those who listen to music online and would like to bring it offline. Even for just downloading a bit of audio every now and then it can be very helpful, but for many it is unnecessary.

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