Quisple: find and play any song from your desktop (via YouTube)

Imagine the situation: you step into a store for a few seconds, and they happen to be playing that extremely catchy song from the 80’s that you used to love, and now its in your head and won’t go away, and you feel that you have to look it up and listen to it again. So what do you do?

Many people use YouTube to look up songs on-the-fly. And so does this strangely named free app. Quisple, in a nutshell, is a searchbox that floats on your desktop that can look up and play any song that you seek, provided that it can find it on YouTube (it will play the audio part only).

The other thing that it will do is keep a history of searches, as a kind of playlist, and optionally let you share it with other users of Quisple.

I installed this little app quite a long time ago based on an email tip and out of curiosity. Didn’t think much of it at the time but to my surprise found myself frequently using it to look up various songs that I wanted to listen to, and thus it earned itself a review spot on my site. More notes as follows:

• Works well: in most instances the song you searched for will magically start playing as soon as you finish typing.
• What to search for: be specific, enter the artist and song name for best results. The search is akin to the "I’m feeling lucky" search on Google; it will NOT give you a list of results to choose from. If it gets confused, nothing will show up.
• The success rate: is high. However, it will miss some songs you’d think will certainly be there. Blame YouTube for that though. The other thing: be prepared to get a "live" or "bootleg" version of the song you are after; again, the reason is that this is what YouTube offers for that particular song.
• The playlist: is not a playlist at all but a history of searches. You can go in and clean up the "playlist" by deleting searches which did not work or missed the mark. You can also extend the number of searches that the program will keep. Lastly, you can share your playlist with other Quisple users, although I did not try this myself.
• Memory consumption: this app will minimize to the system tray when not in use, and takes a very small 6 megs in memory.
• Downloading songs: is not supported. If you must download use Dirpy or Video2mp.
  

The verdict: honestly a very nice little app to have for those instances when you just want to look up and play a song from your desktop and don’t want to bother with logging into YouTube or a search engine, etc. I am not personally not too keen on YouTube as a source of audio but what the heck, this thing works very well for casual listening. If you’re looking to download high quality audio there are other options out there.

http://www.quisple.com/