threevue

Boy, tell you what, I thought I had found a little slice of perfection when I found last.fm about six months ago. Recently I found a similar site, lala.com, and my mind has been blown. Let me break my mind-blowage down for you. Lala is a two-pronged devil: on one hand it lets you archive and stream your entire music library, and on the other hand it lets you search for and find new music to buy on the cheap.

1. You sign up for a free account, and install a “lalamover” program onto your computer. You then specify what folders you want lala to look at (i.e. your music folder) and it will scan all of your music. It then compares your collection to what they already have on their online servers, and that music becomes instantly associated with your lala.com account, allowing you to stream those songs (in surprisingly high quality, too) as much as you’d like. You can create quick playlists of albums, artists, etc, without having to shuffle it like Pandora or last.fm. For all the music you have that lala doesn’t have (which isn’t much – of my 18k songs, it had 14k online already), the lalamover program will upload the rest of the songs and you can then listen to them all you’d like. That last process takes a while (about a week for me), but after that, you have your entire library archived and available to stream from any computer, for free. Pretty awesome.

2. You can also browse or search the lala.com site for music, and listen to anything once (unless you already own it, which means you can listen to it all you want). Signing up for a free account also gives you 25 free “credits”, which is the ability to add a song to your account and listen to it as much as you’d like. After that, you can add a song to your lala.com profile for about $.10 or download the mp3 for about $.89, which is pretty fair.

And in a nice move, you can sync your last.fm and lala.com profiles, so that your listening habits on lala.com will be scrobbled onto your last.fm profile for maximum anal retentiveness.