Create Online Music Playlists with Actionext

actionext describes itself as a music discovery site. Yup, yet another one. But it wouldn’t appear on Make Use Of, if it didn’t offer something new and exciting that made it worthwhile. Now what would that be?

In fact, I would not describe actionext as a music discovery site. It’s different and maybe even better than that. I would say it’s a music lyrics search engine. You don’t have to listen to random tracks based on a pattern you seem to enjoy. Rather you can search for what you like yourself and create a custom music playlist. Additionally, actionext offers lyrics that anyone can edit in a wiki-like manner. Dive in to see more…

I know, there are other music search engines. However, this is the best I have seen in a long time!

Without signing up you can go ahead and search for artists or songs, browse lists of artists from 0-9 and A-Z, pick a featured album from the frontpage or browse the Top 100 list.

The best thing is that while you’re looking for music and adding tunes, the music player will stay with you and you can listen to what you have collected so far continuously, with only minor interruptions to to page loads.

A search will usually return a long list of results. The quality of songs greatly varies, the volume is not equalized, some songs are live recordings, others are album versions. You can’t necessarily tell the quality by the title the creator gave the song, so of course you can test play tunes before adding them to your playlist. Just click the play instead of the plus button.

Results always come back with two rows. On the left are the audio tunes and on the right you’ll see available lyrics. This is where the wiki-like system comes into play as you can edit the lyrics and submit your changes for review.

As you see you can download tracks and get them as ringtones. But don’t get too excited, both links will take you to services that will charge you for the favor.

To save and keep your playlist, you have to sign up. From there you can copy the code and share it through your website, blog or even myspace profile. That’s right, you can easily add actiontext music player with your playlist in it to your Myspace or other social networking profile. The code will be available when you save the playlist and at the bottom of the page when you’re playing it.

Interestingly, playlists can only be deleted when they’re open. You’ll see a “Delete this playlist” link in the top left above the player. A delete button next to each playlist in the “My Playlists” section would certainly be more comfortable. Also I’m not sure whether the amount of playlists you can create is limited. For this test I made 20. That’s plenty and the site probably allows a lot more.

Here for example is a playlist of artists I have seen live during the past two years. Not all of them, just the best of course.

actionext does not disclose the source of its tunes, but I assume it depends on search algorithms, much like the previously mentioned Cr3ation B3ta, the meta mp3 search engine.

What is your impression? Is it worthwhile? Are you gonna share some songs with us?