by Do you LaLa? If not, you have no idea what you’re missing! Forget iTunes. Cancel Rhapsody. Delete your Pandora and Last.fm accounts. From now on, your everything and your always lives in LaLa.com.
LaLa works like this: You can listen to any of LaLa’s 6 million songs on the web one time for free. You get to listen to the entire song and not just a 30 second preview.
Then, if you want to listen to the song again, you either pay 10 cents for unlimited web streaming, or you can download the entire song in non-DRM MP3 format for 89 cents. You can also pay 10 cents first for streaming only and then later upgrade your song for download for an additional 79 cents.
LaLa gives you 50 free songs you can add to your account for web streaming when you open an account. Then you can add funds to your LaLa wallet using a credit card or PayPal.
The real genius of LaLa is in how it provides access to the music you already have on your computer. You can upload your entire local iTunes library to LaLa using the “Music Mover” — and you then have access to all your local songs on the web so you can listen to them anywhere. Your iTunes playlists and listen counts are also preserved on LaLa.
DRM-protected songs are not uploaded to LaLa and they appear as skipped songs. The “errors found” is the DRM encoding.
It took about 10 hours to upload all my music to LaLa, but it was worth it.
Now I can listen to my music library anywhere I wish. If I buy an MP3 from LaLa, I can download the song and LaLa will add it to my iTunes library for me.
The LaLa homepage interface shows you what others are listening to and downloading.
You can also get a quick peek at the top songs on LaLa.
Hovering over an album cover provides a clickable list of all the songs on the album.
LaLa also lets you protect your privacy.
You can play on LaLa and be completely invisible.
You won’t get any recommendations on songs you might like from other like-minded LaLa-ers, but if keeping to yourself is important, then LaLa makes your privacy a prime directive you can invoke at any time.
I’ve been online with LaLa for three days now, and I’m loving LaLa even more than the first day because the song catalog is huge and the streaming sound quality is incredible.
When I can find more than one version of Joe Raposo’s brilliant song — “You Will Be My Music” — I know I’m in the right place.
I realize LaLa is eating up my bandwidth limits by the hour, but the love of LaLa is a passion no man can resist.
I like iTunes a lot but they don’t have a subscription service. I guess this isn’t like that, though, right? Sure seems easy. I’ll have to go sign up and see what’s up.
You’ll love LaLa, Anne. It is made for you. Right, there are no ongoing subscriptions costs like Rhapsody. LaLa is Mac-friendly — unlike Rhapsody — so getting your songs uploaded is really easy, as if finding music to stream. You pay as you go, and you can listen to all 6 million songs for free one time. Pretty neat business model. I like “renting” the songs for 10 cents the most.
Looks interesting, David. I’ll give it a try! I like the music mover feature…
It’s available only in the US for now. but they are working on an international version.
The Music Mover feature works great on a Mac, Dananjay. It’s truly “run it and leave it” and everything is done for you. Then Music Mover watches your iTunes library and when you add new music, it auto-uploads your new songs to LaLa.
Oh, no! Sorry about that, Dananjay! I know they’re actively negotiating with the record companies on many matters. One of the active issues is to increase their enhanced stream rate from 128k to something better, but the record companies are worried about stream ripping. I can understand that concern.
Wow! Love it and miss it…. 🙁
You will love it, Katha! I hope LaLa comes to your home country soon!
I’ve installed LaLa and look forward to using it 🙂
Let me know what you find, Gordon. I find myself buying streaming access to all sorts of hard-to-find songs. It’s a delightful service!
A little more than a year ago, when Radiohead released the album In Rainbows they allowed people download it in mp3 format for whatever price they wanted to pay – with no DRM – yet it was not put on my lala account. Very curious!
Gordon —
Try to manually upload the tracks. Sometimes that works best. If the releases aren’t from a major record company there’s no record of the album existing in the LaLa book logs so LaLa can’t find it.