I wrote a few weeks ago about Simplify Media, which worked great for, like, 3 days. And then my experienced mirrored my friend Jeff’s: Simplify just stopped working. The iPhone app wouldn’t completely update the library, and would crash.
Last week, an old service announced new features: Lala.com used to be a used-CD trading service, and has had a couple of other incarnations, but now it has made deals with record labels to be a legit “music locker,” where people can upload their iTunes library and playlists, and stream their own music from any web browser. One can also invite one’s friends. The theory, apparently, is that if you own the file, you have the right to listen to it. Genius! I’m shocked they got anyone from the industry to go along with it. Then again, they also sell (rent, really) DRM-free music tracks, some for as little as $0.10, and you also get a few for free when you sign up. You can listen to those online, or you can pay more and download that track.
I’m testing it. So far, the app that run on my Mac to upload my music worked well. At first it seemed just a mite glitchy, in that it said it was going to take 12 hours to upload my library, which seemed pretty quick, considering I have 27,000+ songs. But I thought it was just uploading my song titles, and would stream from Lala’s own files, which is what I heard on a podcast.
There has, in fact, been a whole bunch of misinformation about Lala, and I’m trying to be careful. I think it’s hard to get one’s head around, because now I’m pretty sure that the app is, in fact, uploading my entire library.
Statistics:
I started on 10/22, and since then it has uploaded 7,134 songs. It has 11,365 songs remaining, which it will complete in an estimated 31 days, 5 hours. 415 songs have been skipped, with “errors found.” I can’t yet find a log to see which songs have been skipped. One can guess they were “dead tracks” for which I no longer have actual files.
That is absolutely wonderfully wacky.
11,363 to go now. 🙂
I wanted to listen to a Shirelles’ song (we saw the reformed group here Friday night), and was able to add it for 10 cents. Lala also says you can “play any song or album once for free.” I had trouble figuring out how to do that, but I was in a hurry.
The only downer right now is that Lala has promised an iPhone app, which is not yet forthcoming. Their site makes the iPhone’s Safari go south PDQ. But I don’t see any reason they won’t have something in the App Store soon. I’m excited!
UPDATE (10/28): I realized the LalaMover app has 2 sections…
Step 1: “Lala Song Matching (fast)”, which took about 12 hours to “match” 7,134 of my songs with files already in the Lala streaming library, and
Step 2: (I like this) “Brute Force (one byte at a time)”, which is what is uploading each song, and now has 13 days to go, with 8,303 songs remaining.
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