Synchronization – Music Wherever and Whenever

While some folks are musical and can sing or hear music in their head – most of us have to bring professional music along with us. One of the challenges is that at different times of the day we have different devices – CD player in the car, stereo at home, iPod while mobile, PC at home and a PC at work. In the ideal musical world – I would have one copy of my digital music and hear it wherever I am. While we’re not quite there yet – there are growing options for synchronizing all your music. We’ll focus on your PC at work or your laptop and see how services like LaLa and Echodio can make your musical life easier.

The key to synchronizing all your music is iTunes. Though it may seem hard to believe – iTunes is not even six years old having been launched as as the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003. However, in those six years iTunes has become the number one music vendor in America. Certainly iTunes is a great product to rise that far that quickly. However, it’s limitations are with synchronization. You can use other MP3 players with iTunes – but all the best synchronization features and ease of use are reserved for the other Apple products – the iPod and the iPhone.

The bigger synchronization issue is that iTunes is installed on one computer – so all the music that you add is stored on that computer. You probably synchronize most of your favorite music to your iPod or iPhone – but at the end of the day the computer with iTunes is the mother ship. Now if you have multiple PCs at home and multiple kids this can get to be a challenge – “But Dad, my iTunes songs are on that PC !” Then when you head off to work (to make some money and more importantly so you don’t have to listen to the kids screaming) you have the same trouble – you don’t have all your music on your PC at work. And, to further complicate issues, many companies prohibit installing personal software on a work PC.

Now you can make CDs and you can synchronize some of your songs to your portable device – but at the end of the day it’s a hassle. That’s where a service like Lala.com comes in. Lala has two truly unique features – the first of which is the ability to take ALL the digital music that you have and synchronize it to Lala.com and play it from any computer in the world that has speakers and an Internet connection to Lala.com.

Getting your music synchronized is easy. You create a free Lala.com account. You install the Music Mover software (available for Windows and the Mac) and it scans for and identifies all of the MP3s and paid iTunes songs on your hard drive and adds them to your collection on LaLa. You can then stream the music to any Internet-ready device. Those other devices, like your PC at work, don’t need the Music Mover software. You only need to put the software on any PC that has music files that you want to upload to Lala.com.

Technically, the uploading of the music doesn’t even take that long. If Lala.com already has a copy of the song, all it uploads is the note that says “you have rights to this song.” And it does not quiz the heritage of your music – it assumes if it is on your PC, you have the rights for the music. Only when you have a song that Lala.com does not have, like local bands or your own recordings, does Music Mover actually take the time to upload the music to Lala.com. In my case some foreign language songs were the only songs that Lala actually needed to upload.

The second killer feature is a business model that may work, it’s not just free music and the business model that says “pray that we make some money before the RIAA shuts us done.” All the services I already mentioned are free! But the reason why LaLa doesn’t get nearly as much publicity is probably because they actually charge users to listen to new music. But it’s a darn reasonable pricing model and it is advertising free! Lala lets you play millions of songs once without paying. After that you have to pay 10 cents to add it to your collection and stream it whenever you want. But you can get 50 songs free when you sign up, so you can try out the idea before having to pay anything. Then, if you choose to download a MP3 of the song you pay 89 cents (which is cheaper than most music sites) and you get that $.10 streaming fee back. All the MP3s you download are DRM-free, compatible with iTunes and Windows Media Player.

Rumor has a third killer feature on the horizon with an iPhone application that will allow users to stream any song from their music library whenever you want even without a PC:

Especially if you have an iPhone with limited storage space this could be killer – the music will be streamed over the Internet so you won’t need a copy of the songs on your limited iPhone storage space.

Of course, others are lining up behind with Echodio first in line – but just with a beta product for the Mac; the Windows and Linux versions are on the way. With Echodio you download an application which installs as a plugin to iTunes. You create a new Echodio playlist and put in all of the songs you want to upload to Echodio. Then you can stream it through Boxee (used in the beta) or soon Echodio’s own Web player, which will have two-way sync so that when you play a song via the Web it will count as a play in iTunes. Your ratings in iTunes and other tags get synced as well. As you add songs to iTunes – the synchronization is ongoing. Plus, you will have the added bonus of automatically backing up your digital music collection. Pricing is still in flux – but after the beta you will be paying on a per gigabyte basis.

I have to believe that somebody at Apple is thinking about how iTunes begins to synchronize with the Internet. However, till that “apple falls from the idea tree” Lala and Echodio are great products to make it easy to access your entire music library wherever and whenever you want.

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