It’s been a while now since the music-streaming sector really went crazy, with tools that tread close to the edge in terms of their legality in offering enormous amounts of content for ‘free’. Atraci, while not the latest of these to arrive, revives the spirit of the now-extinct HipHop by offering 60 million songs legally, for free, and with no need to register. The trick? It uses the enormous content resources of YouTube to search for each song.
The program interface is clear and direct. A search tab will allow you to search the particular group, artist, or song you’re looking for, showing all relevant results. You can play the song right there, as well as view, either in a smaller window or fullscreen, the associated video clip, since as I’ve mentioned, the search is based on YouTube results.
Does that mean this is illegal? Not at all. Playing YouTube videos is completely legal for the visitor, and the legal responsibility for said content falls to the owner of the channel where it’s published. Thus, while it may be that a large number of those 60 million songs weren’t shared by the authorized creator or distributor, at least this is something that can’t really be controlled. Besides searching for artists, you can also create playlists to store and share however you like, as well as a ‘Discover’ section where you’ll find recommended artists.
Although it hasn’t been clarified in the program itself, it’s quite likely that the Atraci project is simply a change of name for the aforementioned HipHop project given the similarities in operation and the suspicious overlap in the resources used via the project shown in GitHub. We just hope it manages to survive rather longer.
