Moozone – App/Music, Free
Moozone, 2010
"Rökken."

Or maybe enhance Saturday night plans, if it’s early enough where you are and you’re fast enough.
 
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Applications define platforms. Think Myst. Then think Doom. It’s why you aren’t likely to show off, say, Shazam on your Android phone. I mean, it’s cool, it does what it does, you use it, maybe. But it’s an iPhone app. They had it first. They own the awesome on that shit.

If you’re going to show off Android apps, you show off what only Android can do. Sky Maps, the reality mapping in Street View, hell, you walk through Blockbuster scanning barcodes and going “Yeah, really, they’ll all be at home when we get there.”

Or I do, anyway. YMMV, obviously.
 
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Funny coincidence: using the Android Rhapsody beta the past few weeks, I ran into my two biggest problems ever with Rhapsody, then stumbled over a solution to both. In the Android Market, where the app had just landed, the previous day. I was in the middle of trying to write a review of Rhapsody, which…works like Rhapsody, only on Android.

See, I am well sick of my buttloads of music files and dropping them on devices as I need them – iTunes or other middleman software or no. A big part of the promise of an Android phone, for me, was getting a decent streaming service so I wouldn’t have to load songs anymore for casual listening. (I have an excellent – albeit ugly – and very loud digital player that handles every lossless format I’d want, and that’s what I save my good cans for, when I really want to listen.)

Rhapsody is a decent streaming service, and I got a pretty good deal on Rhapsody To Go, and the Android app works just fine. As Spotify is still not available in the US despite endless rumors and promises, I’ll be sticking with Rhapsody on my phone for as long as they only charge me thirteen bucks a month, anyway.

But everybody who’s tried it knows the eternal woe of Rhapsody – a whole bunch of music, you can only preview and buy. And this is arbitrary, at least on your end. So your favorite band may have only three albums present out of twenty, or half the albums are buy-only, or half the tracks on half the albums. You don’t even have to be a big old music geek and compeletist like some people for this to drive you nuts.

Plus, you probably already own the missing music.

On top of that, Rhapsody doesn’t do caching on mobile devices, so you can’t save favorite tunes or albums or playlists to your device and listen when a data connection’s unavailable. And while piracy concerns are obvious, they aren’t my concerns or yours, and other streaming services do this, already.

So what if you liked the Rhapsody beta, like I did, but you’re thinking “Huh, sucks I have to load stuff anyway Rhapsody doesn’t have, and now back in the same place. Plus, no caching? Really?”

So what if you accidentally found this sticking out of the Android Market that very day you were wondering about that?

1. A free Android app
2. With over four gigs of storage free, immediately
3. That streamed your own audio files at 320 kbps
4. And allowed you to cache them to listen to offline?
5. And other people’s playlists, too?
   

Holy fucking shit, meet Moozone.
 
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Moozone is an Android app that lets you stream up to four gigs, right now and free of charge, of whatever MP3s you like and have on hand. True, you can only do MP3 files, but Moozone also streams up to 320 kbps, with a noticeable quality hike from other streaming apps – Rhapsody, Pandora, Slacker, what have you – you may have tried on your phone. (No shit, you will feel it.)

Oh, and it lets you save tracks and playlists to your phone for offline listening, too.

And more.
 
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Moozone’s offerings are barebones – as stated earlier, it only does MP3s and it can get hung up assembling your tracks into albums based on meta data – you may have to set up a few playlists to compensate.
 

Luckily, this isn’t that big a deal – Moozone’s online software may not do much, but what it does makes sense and works about how you’d expect from other music services. And just look at what Moozone gives you in return for that minor trouble, already:
 

You get two gigs of music storage when you sign up, and those prices above? Not monthly, not even yearly – those are one-time purchases. You can bump your storage up forever for a little over a buck a gig, not too shabby.

Moozone also lets you do this:
  

If you don’t have a Dropbox account yet, you might want one – they’re porting their cloud storage app to Android soon. In the meantime, while setting up Moozone, you can set up a new Dropbox account, link the two, and double the free storage you just got.

The whole thing took me about two minutes, and a few uploads later, I was streaming my own music off the innertoobs at surprisingly high quality, like the good lord intended. Sync between the two isn’t perfect, and I got a bunch of garbled file names in the transition from Dropbox to Moozone, but that’s capably handled by the Moozone web interface – it assembles albums out of them, anyway.

And for everything else, there’s playlists.
   
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Moozone looks like just about every other Android app around – system default UI elements and all. The player doesn’t even have repeat or shuffle controls in it, yet. Luckily, I’m pretty sure you’ve got at least one other player that does that already, and you can use that for cached files, anyway, until Moozone grows a few more features.

And yes, what I mean is: cached tracks are saved to your phone and you can play them however you like.  
  

And look what you can do from the library.

So Rhapsody has only one Lush greatest hits album…but 74 tracks on 2 albums? Oh, Moozone…

No, not managing playlists, dummy – you can upload audio files from your phone to the Moozone server from this thing. And you can pull files down to your phone to listen to when you know you’re not getting any bars for a while.
 

And speaking of playlists, you can save them, too. Oddly enough, though, you can’t make playlists on your phone.
  
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But wait – there’s more.

Moozone’s got a social component. You can make your playlists public, and other Moozone users can listen to them. Moozone also sells tracks and albums, for about the same prices as anybody else, and sales made from listens off your public lists earn you money, apparently – I haven’t bothered to investigate that.

Album listings work pretty much like any other online music service – thirty second previews and buttons to buy:
 

Finally, the Vampire Weekend/Hank Williams Jr. playlist of my freaking dreams.

 
But check out the playlists:

And yes, when you save a playlist on the site, it shows up on your phone…
 

…and yes, you can save tracks from other users’ playlists to your phone for offline listening, too.
 

Your nipples should be exploding with joy, at this point.

 
Do not ask the obvious question, before I even tell you: there’s a Facebook app, too, and you can pick a playlist to display and play from your profile. Any playlist – one you picked, one you uploaded yourself with your one hundred favorite songs ever on it, whatever.

Shhh. Let’s just be happy, for the moment. 
 
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Moozone can use some upgrades and tweaks, but it’s been updated steadily just the few weeks I’ve used it. What it does is so powerful and unique, anyway, that I’d have dealt with a lot worse than some messy file names from Dropbox and sticking to MP3s. And I can deal with listening to tracks in order and repeating my own songs for a while, thanks. Moozone lets me carry around as much of my own music as I want without actually carrying it around, and load it on and off my phone as I see fit, anywhere, anytime.

For that reason, I’m giving Moozone a "Rökken." Add some features and – I dunno, maybe FLAC support? – and we’ll make it a "This Guy!"
 

^RNL