MusicBunk – good app to Explore & Share new Music with friends
by Paul Wilks
Jun 6, 2012 8:58 AM –
Install
MusicBunk is a music player that blends the sounds with the social. It’s a handy little music player in its own right, but also includes a neat social platform for sharing your music. It features a nice UI, social network integration and a great discovery tool that enables you to find people with similar music tastes to you.
Price: Free
Tested on: HTC One X
Content Rating: High Maturity
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Nice user interface!
- Intuitive and easy to use!
- Lets you check out and listen to friends’ music lists!
- Post comments, share and like!
Cons
- Not convinced by my ‘musical matches’.
- Music player lacks a lot of functionality.
Features
MusicBunk is a slick and great-looking music player for your Android. Normally, the music that resides on your phone does just that- it plays for you and no one else. MusicBunk looks to rectify that but letting you share your music library with friends. It operates as a stand alone music player, as well as a specialised social network in its own right. So let’s look at these distinct elements.
MusicBunk the Music Player
As a standalone music player, MusicBunk works well but lacks a lot of basic functionality. It has a beautiful UI and lets you search by song or artist yet doesn’t let you look for albums directly. This aside, navigation is fine. Sound is of reasonable quality and, although you don’t have things like a graphic equalizer, the the music is clear and has nice balance. A further issue, however, is that it lacks the flexibility of better music players such as Winamp, N7Player and Songbird. You cannot search by genre and there are no widgets to include on your homescreen. So, while it works perfectly well, it’s not going to ever replace your favoured music player any time soon.
MusicBunk the social platform
This is perhaps what makes MusicBunk different and sets it apart from other music apps. When you sign in with MusicBunk your music lists are uploaded publicly (unless you set them to private). This means people can check out your tracks and even listen to a 30 second sample. You can do likewise with others on the network and, if you like a song, there is a tab to either buy the song via Amazon or find it on YouTube.
You can add friends and check out when they perform actions like adding, liking or creating a playlist. You can like their songs, comment and share links to the things you discover. It’s all very intuitive and is very responsive. The app lets you sign in using Facebook, but this isn’t compulsory and you can also sign in using your email address. When you comment on a song you can also post that with either Facebook or Twitter, so the app has these networks well integrated and this makes it really easy to share.
MusicBunk has this Music Match solution which attempts to find people with similar musical taste to you. However, in my experience I didn’t really think the users it suggested to me had anything like my taste in music. I’m more rock, blues, alternative and indie… not cheesy euro-pop and Akon. Regardless, this at least allows you to explore and discover different things.
I think MusicBunk is a good app and perfect for people who listen to a lot of music and like to share the songs they discover and love. For genuine social interaction you’ll probably need to entice your real friends to sign up to the service, but you can just as easily add people you find on the service already.
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MusicBunk – In-player 1
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MusicBunk – In-player 2
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MusicBunk – Front page
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MusicBunk – Music match
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MusicBunk – Songs
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MusicBunk – New playlist
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MusicBunk – Hear 30 second music excerpts
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MusicBunk – Friends
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MusicBunk – My Profile
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MusicBunk – User profile
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MusicBunk – Settings
Usefulness:
For sharing and discovering new music, MusicBunk is pretty cool. It features all the tools you might expect to make your music listening experience social; liking, sharing, friends, comments and playlists. However, as a music player it lacks big time against other music players you can find in the Google Play Store. I think because of this it’s never going to replace the music player you normally use, and therefore be something you might neglect to use altogether.
Ease of Use:
MusicBunk is incredibly easy to use and is highly intuitive. This is underpinned by the fact that the navigation is very simple and you never get lost in the app. Tabs are both clear and responsive. Creating playlists is a little tricky and takes some exploration but this aside it’s a very easy to use application.
Frequently Used:
If MusicBunk enhanced their music player experience; included widgets, added genre and album to its search capabilities, included an equalizer and maybe made it simpler to create playlists- it would definitely be something you use more often. I think the social side relies on you using the app as a player in its own right and I don’t think it’s good enough for your to consider as a replacement. Therefore, the app might only be something you use when you want to share your musical taste and explore elsewhere.
If you’re someone then that views listening to music and exploring a social network two very different things, you might use MusicBunk far less often. However, if you like the idea of combining these, the app is both stable and easy to use.
Interface:
The interface is very good and is incredibly slick and innovative. I like the screen transitions and rich search environment. The design too looks great and, although it’s not perfect- there is the odd glitch or loading icon to wait for- it is overall very good indeed.