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Synching your collection with Lala involves the use of the Lala Music Mover, a small client which allows you to automatically sync certain folders on your system with Lala. This means that it will attempt to upload any new MP3s it finds in that folder to Lala, and it will automatically download any music you buy through Lala to that folder.
Upload speed is sort of a mixed bag with Lala. The Music Mover starts by scanning all the files you wish to upload. If it can match the file to one of the 6 millions songs in its catalogue, then no actual uploading takes place; it simply enables you to stream that particular song at any time. So, assuming most of your songs are in their catalogue, which includes the vast majority of reasonably-known acts, uploading is an incredibly fast process.
On the other hand, if Lala can’t match your files to a song in their catalogue, it uploads it the old fashion way. The upload speed for this “Brute Force” uploading left us a little underwhelmed. If you’re planning on uploading a lot of music this way, be prepared to leave it on overnight, at the least.
Lala’s music player is, to put it lightly, iTunes-esque. To put it less lightly, it’s a big giant iTunes ripoff. But that’s ok, because iTunes works pretty well (despite what Gordon, in his undying rage would have you think) and Lala’s browser-based player manages to capture most of that useability.
It’s got all the standard features like playlists, and can sort by genre, artist, or album. Sound quality is good, as far as streaming audio goes, and we very rarely experienced any stuttering or long buffering times.
If you like your music listening legit, you’re covered with Lala, which allows you two ways to get music legally. First, you can pay 10 cents per track to add the song to your online library, allowing you to stream it as much as you like, without actually owning the track. This is obviously attractive for its bargain-basement pricing, although if Lala were to ever go out of business (as online music services are wont to do) you’d be left high and dry. You can also pay 79 cents per song to actually buy any of Lala’s licensed music, allowing you to stream it and download it to your hard drive. This is still a better deal than the iTunes store, and as we mentioned before, the selection is good.
There are about a thousand different services which will host your photos on the web, but there’s really only two that are currently in contention for first place: Flickr and Picasa. Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, has become a household name (at least among the more technologically inclined households) for its ease of use and robust organizational and social-networking features. Google’s Picasa, on the other hand, is focused on synchronization between the excellent machine-side viewer/organizer and the Picasa online service. Both are excellent offerings, but in the context of this article we’ve got to give our recommendation to the service with the best online component: Flickr.
If you’re even remotely familiar with the internet, you’ve probably already heard of Flickr. It’s a photo storage service and social network that’s nearly ubiquitous among the net-savvy. What you might not know about, however, is the impressive depth of features it provides for organizing and sharing photos. We’ll highlight some of these features now, to better explain why we ranked Flickr as the best of its cohort.
Any good photo manager (online or off) needs first and foremost to do an excellent job of organizing your pictures. Photos should be able to be grouped into flexible categories, and it should be easy to find exactly the pictures you’re looking for, quickly. On all of these counts, Flickr succeeds brilliantly.
Flickr organizes photos with sets, collections and tags. Sets are your standard albums—groups of pictures. Collections are sets of sets, allowing you to group albums by theme or by year. Tags, as usual, allow you to assign descriptors to images, which you can later search or sort by.
Keep reading to find out what else we like about Flickr!
Comments are closed on this article
shortbus88
February 04, 2009 at 12:08pm
We are talking about music, pictures, social networking.
Stuff for personal use.
It is a no brainer that corporations should not be storing sensitive data in the cloud.Class group projects could benefit from cloud computing just for convenience. I would also save a copy of the data on my own harddrive to backups, but save the changes in the cloud for the rest of my class project team to see as well.
i think that cloud computing has its place for data that you would not care if others could see it.
WildmanCAL
February 04, 2009 at 7:10am
If a person relies solely on cloud computing, then they are asking for big trouble if they lose their internet connection. Most broadband connections are fairly reliable these days but there is always that "I need to work on my school paper" and BAM! your internet connection is down and you cannot access your documents because they are stored on SOMEONE ELSE'S COMPUTERS! Thank you, no, but I will take storing on MY hard drive and it be MY responsibilty to backup MY data.
Keith E. Whisman
February 03, 2009 at 1:37pm
I think this is a big mistake for companies. With a third party holding a companies information it's going to be easy for companies to secretly sell it's customers data to rivals and hackers to break in and steal information. I don't like it one bit and It's a terrible idea for companies to rely on cloud computing entirely. Perhaps for receptionists at doctors offices and maybe market research companies for it's mass call centers. But to store information on a third parties servers it's a mistake. I can't believe people are so excited about this technology. It's definately not a technology enthusiasts like us here enjoying MaximumPC could possibly get excited about.
I Jedi
February 03, 2009 at 2:20pm
Agreed. I will never put private and sensitive information of mine on cloud computing. Too dangerous. I'd have to see some hard core reviews/statistics. etc to prove to me that this technology is safe, reliable, and without worry.
