Its offerings include full length album previews, an online store with 7 million songs, DRM-free high quality variable bit rate MP3 music downloads, a web-based music jukebox and social network, all in one tightly knit interface.

Lala turns out to be one of those websites that are great, yet somehow aren’t yet gathering the crowds lesser competitors are. With just over 20 people on the staff and consistent funding from Warner Music, you can be sure this service won’t disappear into the mist of the economic recession. While the 500 000+ members don’t stack up to Last.fm or Facebook, it isn’t exactly a niche audience.

Lala’s web designers and coders created an Apple-like experience, everything neatly integrated and in sync. A simple, functional interface reveals the minimalistic approach to the design of the web site. I wonder though if the iTunes interface is the pinnacle of media player design, designers decided to cut some corners or they intentionally opted for a similar layout to make new users feel ‘at home’.

Once you’ve created an account, which doesn’t take more than 30 seconds and doesn’t require a credit card, you can preview whole songs and albums for free (once). Your existing music library can be easily imported using the Lala Music Mover, a small application that matches songs on your computer with the catalog of music downloads available online. It works on Windows as well as on Macs and doesn’t use a lot of resources. Once the upload process is completed, you can listen to all of your songs online, with no additional charge, no restrictions or ads, from any computer with an Internet connection. It will even import playlists and ratings (using the beta version).

Individual tracks can be purchased and downloaded in MP3 format without DRM and a high quality variable bit rate encoding. Downloads are automatically added to your iTunes or Windows Media Player if you installed the Lala Music Mover. For ten cents you can purchase the right to stream a song from the website as many times as desired, a so-called “web song“. Depending on the song popularity and release date, MP3 music downloads range from $0.79 to $1.29, the same pricing scheme of the iTunes Music Store. Lala has strong connections with the music industry and currently indexes over 7 million songs.

The social networking aspect of the service combines different ideas from more general social networks such as Twitter and Facebook and does a good job of serving recommendations, aiding music discovery, while not duplicating unnecessary functionality.

The only caveat to this service is that it only works with United States IP addresses due to music licenses. Of course, you guys know how to get passed that. Go to Lala, give it a try and then come back to share your experiences in the comments. For more posts related to music, you should definitely have a look at MakeUseOf’s music section.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Top 5 Websites To Listen To CDs Before Buying (22)
• 5 Online Radio Stations To Get Your Music Fix (18)
• TubeRadio.fm– A Slick & Cool Internet Music Player for YouTube (8)
• Top 4 Sites To Download Free, Legal Concert Recordings (6)
• The 3 Best Online Radio Players For Your Desktop (12)

ZumoDrive is an online storage service that everyone can use to store their files in the Cloud and access them from different computers. What makes it different from the rest of its competitors is the way it manages the data on your computer. Most storage services create a folder on your local hard drive and sync all of the data to/from that folder. This might be a good idea in order to keep the data in sync, but what if you are using a 4GB Netbook and you have 10GB of data in the cloud? Your Netbook won’t be able to hold all the data.

What ZumoDrive does is: mount itself as a drive on the computer and “tricks” the computer into thinking that the hosted data are local. When you click to open any file (or music) from ZumoDrive, it will stream those files from the cloud and open them with any local application. This way, even if you are running out of hard disk space, you can still access 10GB (or even 500GB) of data from your computer effortlessly.

What happens if I am not connected to the Web?

There will certainly be times when you are not connected to the Web, so does it mean that you won’t be able to access to your data? This is what I thought when I first used ZumoDrive. Apparently, ZumoDrive is clever enough to prevent this from happening.

When using ZumoDrive, your hosted files are tagged with a specific logo on the icons. This means that the files are currently residing on the cloud server.

When you click to open any file, it will be streamed from the server and cached on your computer. In the event that your computer is not connected to the Web, there is still a cached version on your computer that you can open, view and edit; just like any other file. The next time you are connected to the Web, ZumoDrive will sync the local data changes back to the cloud server.

In the settings page, you may configure the amount of hard disk space available for caching and where to store the cache. You may also set the policy for ZumoDrive to follow, whether or not to always stream file from the server, to always cache it locally or a mixture of both.

ZumoDrive for iPhone/iPod Touch

Who says you can’t playback 10GB of music when you only have a 8GB iPhone? With the Supersize Me (iTunes Store link) free iPhone app (and an Internet connection), you can play your entire music library, open and edit your documents and see view your photos directly from the cloud.

ZumoDrive is currently available for Windows, Mac OS X and iPhone/iPod Touch. Linux users can only access ZumoDrive via the Web interface. According to ZumoDrive, a Linux version is coming soon, so stay tuned to the ZumoDrive developers.

A free account comes with 1GB of storage space. Those who require more storage space may upgrade to a premium account at prices ranging between $2.99 (10GB) to $79.99 (500GB) per month. For me, 1GB of free storage space will suffice. What about you?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Windows Live Skydrive & 3 Alternative Online Storage Services (40)
• Top Free File Hosts To Store Your Files Online (154)
• Send several GBs of data to Friends using Podmailing (14)
• Rapidshare – Easiest File Sharing (4)
• Manage & Share Your Media Files With One Terabyte Of Free Oosah (15)

I’d love to hear from you. Send me your MP3 files containing comments about the show, reviews of your favourite websites or just general chitchat. I’ll choose a few to play on the show each week. Send them to podcast [at] makeuseof [dot] com.

If you look underneath the links from the show on this page, you will see a little media player where you can listen to the podcast right here on the site. Or if you prefer, you can right-click on the “audio MP3″ logo and save the MP3 file to your computer for listening on your MP3 player or iPod.

The podcast is available through iTunes so don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast if you have an iPod, or in another podcatcher if you have a different MP3 player.

• Build Yourself a Virtual Cloud to Fall Back On
• Online FTP Clients: Use FTP Online without Installing A Client
• Calgoo Connect & Hub – Calendar Syncing And Sharing Made Easy
• 4 Search Engines to Search Wikipedia The Pro Way
• Apple iGun

[display_podcast]

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Make Use Of Podcast #9: Selling your home online, new Twitter clone and Syncplicity (4)
• Make Use Of Podcast #34: Star Wars A Capella (9)
• Make Use Of Podcast #10: Chipping in, virtualizing and working well with others (4)
• ZumoDrive – Cloud Storage Service With A Twist (10)
• ZScreen – Make Screen Captures & Upload To Imageshack (15)

Ultimately, the cloud will be able to replace a majority of everyday programs on local desktop computers. This brings freedom and convenience in that we don’t have to buy expensive software, we can access our data wherever we go, and we don’t have to worry about updates or security, since it’s all taken care of by the providers. The danger of course is loss of control over your privacy and data, and potential consequences are data piracy or identity theft. What if the service fails and data cannot be accessed? Imagine the internet went down, all hell would break loose. These are just some of the scenarios to be considered.

While at this point it may not be advisable to transfer your whole life to a cloud, detaching from a desktop computer may actually have great advantages, such as retaining a great deal of independence. So after starting with a somewhat lengthy introduction, let me provide you with a short list of online software alternatives to popular desktop applications.

Microsoft Word becomes Zoho

Zoho is, without a doubt, one of the most complete online office suites available to date. Zoho comes with a word processor, spreadsheets, presentation tool, note taker, organizer, project management, web conferencing and much, much more.

Other than that it provides plugins for MS Office, MS Outlook, Firefox, and IE to ensure you’re not locked up with this service, but can take your files out of the cloud to create backups or avoid online storage.

Microsoft PowerPoint becomes Preezo

If you don’t want to rely on Zoho to replace your whole office suite, here is an alternative for PowerPoint worth mentioning. Preezo is an Ajax-based web application to create and share professional presentations over the web without the need for software or plugins installed on your computer. It totally looks and works like PowerPoint and you can import or export .ppt files. Perfect.

Microsoft Excel becomes EditGrid or ChartAll

Not quite Excel but close. EditGrid is one of the most comprehensive online spreadsheet providers. Another possible alternative, much simpler but therefore not requiring you to sign up, is chartAll.

MS Outlook becomes Google Mail

What more do I need to say? At this point we are stuck with Google because to my knowledge there is not a worthy alternative to GMail.

If you would like to learn more about GMail, and let me tell you there is a lot you probably don’t know about it yet, search Make Use Of for some great articles! Or go directly to our Gmail tag.

Microsoft OneNote becomes LinoIt or Springnote

LinoIt is an online pinboard to which you can stick your notes to. You can have multiple canvases for multiple purposes, make them public or share them with specific users. The stickies can serve as reminders or to-to lists, organizing and customizing stickies is easy, and you can post new ones by eMail.

If you’re looking for more advanced note taking, give Springnote a try, which I reviewed in detail several weeks ago.

Adobe Photoshop becomes Splashup or PhotoShop Express

Websites like Photoshop Express or Splashup may not be a complete or worthy replacement for Adobe’s Photoshop. However, they provide a very familiar interface and cover more than just the most basic photo editing tools. Definitely better than fiddling with some crappy desktop application (e.g. the Windows default), when Photoshop is not available.

Instant Messengers become Meebo

Meebo allows instant messaging through all popular messengers via your browser. It supports AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, and more.

Simon wrote about Meebo and two more web-based IM clients back in July this year.

Your Desktop Online

Back in March I wrote about online desktops (aka Web Os). As pointed out in the comments, this may not make sense for most people. However, to retain a familiar desktop environment with shortcuts and wallpapers, it may be quite nice to have. It’s those seemingly superfluous things that make life great.

Now that you know some alternatives to desktop applications, let me say this: It may be convenient to use Google for everything, but unless there is absolutely no better alternative, don’t. Keep a variety and make your private cloud rest on more than just one foot. Last but not least, keep backups!

How far into Cloud Computing are you, and which services would you rather not trust anonymous providers with?

(By) Tina is a regular MUO author. In her offline life she’s a PhD student interested in unraveling signaling events that determine cartilage and bone development.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Use OfficeTab To Give Microsoft Office Firefox-Like Tabs (44)
• Top 3 FREE web-based Office Suites (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) (12)
• OxygenOffice Pro: Enhanced Version of OpenOffice (5)
• How To Split a Huge CSV Excel Spreadsheet into Separate Files (5)
• How To Open, Edit and Print any Text Document File (5)