Awhile ago I wrote about the music service I would love (but doesn’t exist). It still doesn’t but I was reading about lala.com and realized it might just do the trick.

Lala claims to:

• let you upload your whole catalog of mp3s
• let you listen to your music anywhere there’s a web browser
• sync the music you uploaded with your iPod

Hmmm… access to all my music? I can listen anywhere? i can use Apple’s hardware? Sign me up. And in fact, I did… sign up. A few minor issues at first:

• The uploading is so silly, but fine, I understand that’s the reality of the industry right now
• The user experience emulates iTunes. I’m not sure who decided iTunes was the end-all-be-all music management/enjoyment experience, but fine. Unfortunately, if you’re going to emulate a popular application and you don’t get all the small details right then not only do you not benefit from the familiarity, you lose points with users for not nailing your copy. (Oh, and the lala site is kind of ugly, but whatever. I’ll settle if it does what I want.
• If I upload 256k mp3s am I hearing 256k mp3s on playback? Am i syncing 256k mp3s back to my iPod? The sparse explanations on their website are silent on this topic (as far as I could tell).

But even these things would have been fine, unfortunately I ran into more problems:

• the iPod download control (I understand they need some client bits to do the iPod sync) wouldn’t install properly in Firefox. OK, I can switch to IE.
• but in IE even though I got it installed I never got it working completely as it kept crashing repeatedely. The thing was super unstable. Lame.

Almost worse however was the fact that there appears to be no way to sync playlists (or at least I couldn’t find one). According to the FAQ:

If I create a playlist on lala can I sync it to my iPod?
Yes. Connect your iPod to your computer and go to your “My Music” page. Select the songs you’d like to add to your iPod and then click the “add songs to iPod” link in the top navigation. To select more than one song at once, hold down the shift key. Please note that only songs that you own on that playlist will be synced to your iPod.

Apologies in advance if I’m somehow misunderstanding this, but this seems completely disingenuous to me. Are they seriously telling me that the way I “sync my playlist” is to sync all the songs on it? I knew I could do that. I want the actual list. If you don’t have the feature don’t give me an insulting answer when I ask about it. Is there anyone stupid enough to be happy with this answer?

And of course, without the ability sync playlists to my iPod, Lala is out of the running as a solution for me. :( Of course, given that their software crashes with a depressing regularity, even with the playlist sync feature Lala wouldn’t do me much good.

On a related front, the folks at Rhapsody have indeed made progress on their Mac player plug-in… sort of. On a vanilla Mac OS X 10.4 the installer worked on Safari like a champ and made for a nice playback experience. However, the installer failed to work on Firefox. Not sure what happened there. I’ll try again just to confirm. Rhapsody also appeared to add sales of DRM free MP3s recently. Small selection so far, but go go go.