Looking for a way to stream an extensive library of music, create custom playlists of your favourite tracks, and listen to it all for free without having to deal with ads or create an account? Atraci is a new service that might just have what you want.
Here’s how it all works: After you’ve downloaded and installed the Atraci client, find a track you’d like to listen to, then the service searches for a YouTube video that meets a certain sound quality criteria and streams the song to you through the player. It also plays the actual video in the bottom left-hand corner of the window — you can maximise it if you want to watch it — but Atraci is designed more as an audio-streaming service.
You can search by artist, song title or a combination of the two, and then create custom playlists of whatever songs you want. When you break it all down, it’s essentially a better way to search YouTube music videos and songs to make custom playlists.
Keep in mind, there are a few kinks in the service. Atraci is fairly new and being worked on by developers in their free time, so features are limited for now. You can’t reorganise playlists after songs have been added just yet, but there is at least an option to shuffle the songs so the order isn’t static. You have to be connected to the internet to listen, and an offline listening option is incredibly unlikely. Depending on the videos, volume levels can vary since audio is coming from a wide variety of sources. Lastly, there is no radio option. You can’t really use Atraci for music discovery as well as you can with other services, but there are plenty of great options for that out there.
The upsides: Atraci is completely free, totally legal, you don’t need any sort of account to use it, the library is twice the size of the iTunes library, and the service is entirely ad-free. Atraci is available for download on Windows, Mac and Linux. To learn more and download the client, check the link below.
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