Music Junk

Summary

Honk if you love vinyl! I can’t hear anything… I guess that means that some of you have never handled a vinyl record. I worked as a DJ for several years and have to confess that I find records pretty sweet. But even so: they tend to tick me off. Why, you ask? Have you ever had to drag around boxes full of vinyl records? When it was to time to pack up – at 6 am – the last thing I felt like doing was hauling around crates of records—that stuff weighs a ton!

How lucky are contemporary DJs? All you need is a computer filled to the brim with digitalized tracks and you’re good to go. It’s crazy how much and how fast the music industry has changed. People used to venture out to the record store around the corner in order to get their music fix. Today 25% of total sales and 70% of digital sales of music is via iTunes.

Are there any alternatives? Free-of-charge alternatives? I recently came across an app that allows you to download music—for free! But before I get into any of that let me warn you: I’m not a lawyer and have no idea if any of this is legal, despite the fact that I found the app via a very popular website.

So what’s the deal with this app? Read on and find out!
 

Music Junk is a search engine specialized in music, no big surprise there. You can search according to the following categories:

• Track title
• Artist

The outcome is a pretty confusing list of every title that matches the search criteria.

By clicking on the track title for a long time a box containing the following options opens up:

• Preview: a small sound morsel of the song
• Lyrics: you can see the lyrics, provided that they’re available. I couldn’t find lyrics for ANY of the songs I selected, so my jury’s out on how well this feature functions and whether one is routed to another page
• Download: self-explanatory

You can choose to where the tracks should be downloaded/saved, and you can listen to songs via your media player once you’ve downloaded them. It’s unclear where the tracks come from; the app seems to be built on some sort of crawler which combs through the internet searching for available mp3s.

Bottom line:
Let me say it again: I don’t have a clue as to whether these songs are available in a legal fashion, but I have to say that it didn’t seem quite kosher to me. I noticed a lot of Cyrillic characters which leads me to assume that the app taps into a lot of Russian servers. But you have to be the best judge of that. I personally prefer to buy music from sources I know and trust.

On the whole I can’t say that I enjoyed this app an enormous amount. The selection seems to be quite vast and I was able to find a lot of the songs I was interested in. I also like the Preview option. But aside from that… meh. If you click on a title it gets listed 20 or 30 times. Also, it isn’t possible to search according to genre which means you have to know exactly what it is that you’re looking for. Browsing isn’t possible.

That’s a two star rating in my book.

 

The app has a neat and tidy kind of look. There are four main options listed on the homescreen:

• Search Box
• Editor
• Settings
• Exit

Search Box is obviously the main function. I couldn’t quite figure out what Editor is supposed to do, despite trying to get to the bottom of why my phone’s file structure is displayed when you click on it.

You can determine how you want to download as well as how long the search results lists should be under Settings.

The track list is pretty confusing, and on the whole the app is lacking in visual refinement.

I don’t think I’ll become a fan of this app, probably due to the fact that I support legal purchasing of music and don’t want to get twisted up in copyright infringement. Furthermore, I felt the app wasn’t exactly a labor of love. The way in which advertisement is presented in the app is pretty ugly, and the main function – finding the correct track title – isn’t well thought-through.

 

Music Junk is fast and there were no crashes.

Music Junk can be downloaded free of charge. However, the ads are pretty annoying and sometimes come across as rather silly (“If you don’t click on this you’re not cool!”… WTF?)