How would you like an easy way to round up your favorite YouTube music videos and arrange them into playlists? How about the ability to shuffle the playlists, or even share them with friends?
TubeRadio.fm takes YouTube and gives it a music player interface. This makes it much easier to fill out a custom playlist compared to YouTube, where you might spend most of your time tracking down each individual song. You can also check out a band's discography and buy full albums from Amazon.
The most impressive part about TubeRadio.fm is just how quick it is to search YouTube and find videos. The video list pops up almost instantly, and it is very easy to add a bunch of videos to a custom playlist.
But while the emphasis on making the site look exactly like a music player interface makes it easy to add videos to playlists, it tends to detract from the main goal of the site: custom music video playlists. The music videos are regulated to a small size (320x225) and plopped rather awkwardly down at the bottom of the screen.
And let's face it, many music player interfaces -- especially iTunes -- aren't all that user-friendly. (In fact, iTunes could win an award for bad user interfaces). It would have been much better to simply grab the good part of these interfaces (ease of adding songs to a playlist) and go back to the drawing board on the rest. I'd also like to see a way to play the videos centered on the screen with a bigger resolution and without all the interface trappings.
However, for a website that just launched, I have to give it a thumbs up. It's definitely a great website for music lovers. Hopefully, they'll launch new features and tidy up the interface in the future.