This is going to be a short review about GuaMuzik, Malaysia’s latest music portal by its parent Gua. I never had the intention to use this portal because I never liked Gua anyway. Credit to MohdIsmail, I was curious to look around.

Basically, it has the same design as Gua - kinda cool on certain parts, and too much cluttering on other part ; they are using tables anyway. I’m not going to talk about the design this time. I was trying to be positive-minded with our local product

Well, let see what they have.

Dude, that Too Phat song is so old. Why it is still in top 100 download? 

And yeah, they have this Play and Buy feature. Cool, you can buy songs (duh!). RM3 per song is quite a reasonable price I guess. This is a good thing for Malaysian - an alternative measure to fight illegal download and songs piracy. Now you don’t have to buy the whole album to listen to only one song. Just buy one for RM3.

But, what a minute - why can’t I click those (very tiny) Play and Buy buttons? Do I have to register first? I don’t think so. I was using Firefox, so I tried switching to IE6.

Yeah, it works there. There you go - you need IE to play and buy songs in GuaMuzik. Coolness.

And they provide a tool for you to test the downloading feature on your computer.

I tried. And again; failed. Now it is confirmed that you need to use IE to download songs from GuaMuzik. Coolness confirmed.

I tried with my IE6, and it works flawlessly - the download is quite fast for a sample song; less than 2MB of course.

Media file

How about the format? Downloaded songs are DRM-protected WMA format - can only be played on Windows Media Player 9.0 or above. They can be burnt into CD and transferred to digital portable player for a limited number. DRM-protected songs huh? A lot of debates has been going on regarding DRM-protected media [1]. Maybe I shouldn’t talk about it.

Since I have to use Media Player to transfer songs, I don’t think its going to work on my iPod Touch. I checked the list - and yeah, no Apple devices are supported. Shame. Luckily other big names such as Creative and iRiver are in there.

The Verdict?

Nope. I’m not gonna be using it anytime soon.
They should make it accessible from all browsers though.
Maybe the DRM part is unavoidable, so thats cool.
How about make it available in more formats, rather than just WMA? Some people use iPod and they need iTunes.

Have you tried?