Your Music Library in the Cloud

What is the best service to use for transferring and using your music collection in the cloud. I have found 3 services that look promising. Echodio (http://www.echodio.com/), Zumo Drive (http://www.zumodrive.com/) and Lala (http://www.lala.com/). Echodio and Zumo Drive you have to pay for while Lala is free. Echodio is only for macs and is only used with itunes (limited to 3 different machines) while I have no tested it out, it did not appeal to me because I have a PC at home and mac at work. Zumo Drive is a cloud storage server for all media types not just music. They offer 2gb for free and then a monthly fee for more space. The service works as a virtual drive so it seems that you can use any music player software that you want. I have no personally used this because I have a giant library and dont want to pay for storage space at the moment. Lala was the most promising and seems to be the best way to go for music. The only limitation that it has is you have to be connected to the net to be able to listen to your music. There is no monthly fee and you have unlimited storage. The website has its own built in player and it works similar to any music player except there is a social aspect to it. You can follow people and also have followers like twitter, you can also recommend people songs artists and albums. One of the best features is the store. You can buy an entire album to download or just to have on the web for a discounted price (usually 99 cents). If you are looking to have your entire library on the net and not to backup on your computer then this is the way to go. Recently Lala was bought by apple, only time will tell on what they will do with them but it seems like itunes could be going in this direction. The only downfall right now is mp3 player integration, there is no iphone/ipod touch app and all other mp3 players cant grab the music from the website. If they can somehow come out with the technology to have the songs be playable on mp3 players than it will be the best service out there. Out of the three is you are looking for a free way to have all of your music on the web then Lala is the way to go. If you want to pay a free to keep all of your media on the web then Zumo Drive is your best bet. For me Lala is my choice and my first step into cloud.

What is the cloud?

In order for someone to understand how the cloud is taking over, we need to first define it. A technical definition is "a computing capability that provides an abstraction between the computing resource and its underlying technical architecture (e.g., servers, storage, networks), enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction." In other words, all of your data isn't stored on your computer anymore but rather on a server somewhere on the internet and therefore you can access it anywhere you go. This blog will focus on myself using resources around the internet to be completely in the cloud. I will try and have everything from my music collection, to do lists, health tracking and even my phone number on the internet to be access where ever I may be. I will try and update this blog every other day and update what websites and software I am using in order to become fully immersed in the cloud...