How To Move Your Music Library Online with Moof

I don’t know why everything these days needs to be in the ‘cloud’ (online). Is it a legitimate effort to update old business models to our current computing environment? Or are developers taking advantage of investors predisposition to invest in young, untested web technologies?

I’m still debating that issue and I’d sure be glad to hear what you think. Meanwhile, let’s take a look at Moof, the newest attempt at moving your music library to the Internet.

Moof addresses the segment of the market that prefers to stream music from a web-based service rather than storing songs locally and using software like iTunes. The convenience factor cannot be ignored – I’ve noticed many people, and students particularly, would prefer listening to Spotify rather than downloading songs from via P2P or online music stores like iTunes Store and its cheaper alternatives.

It’s easier, just open it and have some background music while your work. Or instantly search and listen to an entire album that a friend recommended.

While similar streaming services, notably Mixtape, incorporates some social networking features, Moof sticks to the basic functionality of playback and playlists creation.  There’s another quite striking difference between Moof and other similar services – it uses YouTube to provide playback. If your song wasn’t uploaded to YouTube, you won’t be able to play it back.

Personally, I think that the API did a great job of retrieving songs – finding even some of my most obscure artists. Unfortunately for hard-core indie music fans, there’s no feature that allows manual uploading of songs, something that the Lala Music Mover does automatically.

To sum it up in a sentence, Moof is basically a front-end to YouTube, with an interface that resembles a desktop media player.

It’s worth mentioning that Moof also allows you to import your iTunes Library XML file – which means you will be have a sort of a backup of your music. You won’t be able to use the service to re-download the songs in case your hard drive crashes, but at least you could listen to them online.

The interface resembles iTunes although it doesn’t provide the same feature set. Some more picky users will notice that there’s no way to rate songs or view track numbers. I do prefer this layout to Groovesharks’s Apple-esque cascading menus.

While Moof doesn’t bring anything groundbreaking to the equation, as the idea of a cloud music library was already implemented some time ago, it’s definitely worth checking out. Visit Moof and don’t forget to tell us what you think in the comments.