Why Lala took over iTunes

You may have read that Apple bought cloud music streaming service Lala. Well, in my little Justinverse the opposite happened, Lala took over iTunes.

I've been using Lala for a couple years now. Originally I just wanted an easy way to stream my iTunes library at work. Now I simply want a piece of music management software that works.

I have a lot of music. Just over 15,000 songs clocking in at around 80 GBs to be exact. Moving that kind of library around from old computer to new computer or even just to a new hard drive on the same computer is a serious pain in the ass through iTunes. I've tried using their preferred way of doing it and I've tried moving everything through Windows and then pointing iTunes back to the library and I've even tried storing it on an external drive to keep my laptop's hard drive freed up. Every time iTunes can't find songs or can't find my library at all in the case of my laptop (despite my mapping of the drive to always show up as the same "letter.")

While I can't give up on iTunes for syncing my iPhone / iPod, I have given up on it for doing what it was originally supposed to do: play my goddamn music.

I've found a better solution through Lala. I've synced up all my purchases and uploaded any songs they didn't have so now my whole collection resides in the cloud (a long process, but once it's done, it's done.) I can play it from any computer with an internet connection (if I could stream it from my phone it'd be perfect!)

So now that Apple has bought Lala I'm left wondering what the future of Lala's service looks like. Reports seem to indicate that Apple wants access to Lala's brilliant engineers more than their service. Here's to hoping that the core service sticks around for a while, at least until Apple can play catch up in the very category it created.