Update: Apple’s closing Lala down on May 31st. Grrrr.

In high school, I had a CD collection that took up most of my bookshelf. Now, I have a hard drive full of music instead.  That means less clutter, but it also means that it’s more of a pain to move my music from one place to another.  LaLa lets you store your music in the cloud, so you can access it from anywhere, and also helps you discover new songs and artists.

Here’s how it works:  When you create an account and download the “LaLa music mover,” you can upload all of the songs on your hard drive to your LaLa account. Storage is unlimited, and LaLa speeds up the process by matching your music to the songs already in their collection, and only making you manually upload what they don’t already have.

The amount of time this takes depends on how much music you have and how many tracks are already on LaLa-it took about 6 hours for me.

Once your music is uploaded, you can access it from anywhere there’s an Internet connection. So, I can listen on my laptop, my parents’ computer…wherever.  LaLa also makes it easy to add to your collection-you can listen to anything in their catalog once, then pay for either web access (around 10 cents) or for an actual mp3 download (usually less than $1.00).

LaLa also helps you discover new stuff. You can “follow” your friends, for instance, and listen to what they are listening to. You can also look up “influencers” on LaLa who listen to artists that you like, and get recommendations from them.  Finally, you can look up a specific genre and just have LaLa play you a mix of music from that genre for an hour.

LaLa also lets you create and share playlists, and you can share what you’re listening to via Facebook and Twitter.

As much as I like LaLa, there are a few things that I think would make it even more useful:

An Android/iPhone app- Pandora has one, LaLa should, too.

A browser extension so that it can be easily turned on/off.  When I get a phone call, I don’t want to have to spend too much time hunting for the LaLa tab in Chrome  so I can turn down the music.

A better way to upload the songs that LaLa doesn’t have in their catalog.  Currently, the “Music Mover” only tells you how many songs LaLa was able to match,  it doesn’t tell you  WHICH songs it was unable to match.  So, if you have a large collection, there’s no way to quickly and easily figure out which songs you need to upload manually.

What do you think of LaLa?

Our Rating of LaLa

Tags: Music

Categories:web