However, when the iPhone 4S came out, I migrated back to the iOs world. So when they made the announcement yesterday, I of course checked it out again. Overall rating: C.

The upside:

First the platform is unchanged except it isn’t beta and you can upload 20,000 songs for no cost. This is pretty good if you ask me. I have about 6,000 songs up there now. They have added a more comprehensive music store and just like iTunes they are giving away free music all the time. The quality is better on the tracks though as they are 320kbps versus iTunes 256kbps.

The downside:

There is no native iOs application. However there is an iOs friendly HTML5 web app. This uses the HTML5 audio tag to stream music. When you first load the app, you are shown artists and can see albums, songs and playlists if you slide left and right. There is search, a right hand alpha listing to jump around and logout. Thats it for initial controls. No “play” fromt he top level meaning you can’t just jump into playing a random song (I like that on the web and in iTunes). Upon finding you artist, you have to click to open the artist, then the album, then the song before you get a “play” option. What if I want to play all songs by the artist? Clicking play and letting it run on the first song will automatically go to the next track when the first completes.

Since this is a web app, it doesn’t respond to the play controls available in the iOs compatible headphones. This is a feature I love in iTunes, especially when its cold out or I am at the gym. Pandora even has pause/play working via the headphones. Since it is a web app streaming over the internet, use it on wifi. over 3G, due to the high quality of the tracks it stutters and buffers like crazy. In addition, one of the issues I had with Pandora’s HTML5 solution and the beta google Music is sometimes the next song just won’t play. This happens in the iOs web app as well.

The big downside:

So I bought a bunch of the free albums at launch and even paid for the new Coldplay ($4.99). However they didn’t show up on the iOs web app to play. Messing around with it for a while I decided to erase any content related to Google Music and see what happens. When you first launch the app, it asks you to authorize allowing the database to be up to 25 mb. In order for new music you just bought to show up you need to delete this library/database and start over. In addition the UI is slow to respond, sometimes doesn’t render anything, and crashes frequently. While some of the labels are readable by VoiceOver, they are the labels that are not rendered on the current UI, therefore I deem it inaccessible. Don’t even try to listen to it read you the name of the album art image.

Summary:

If there was a native iOs app, I would use this all the time. Maybe more than iTunes as I don’t have enough room on my iPhone to hold all my music. But to make it good, they need to work on compression schemes for the music over 3G. I certainly like this over iTunes Match as it is free and DRM free, it just isn’t usable on an iPhone yet.

Well for the past few weeks she has been participating in Famecast.com’s Fenom contest. And today she was the winner for the singer/songwriter stage. If you haven’t heard of her, check out on one of these websites:

• Famecast.com: http://www.famecast.com
• Her blog: http://theblondecondition.wordpress.com/
• Myspace: www.MySpace.com/JulieMoffitt
• YouTube: http://youtube.com/JulieMoffittVideo
  

Here is one of my favorite performances: It’s The End of the World as We Know It