If I were a Lala user, I’d be pretty angry right now: last week Apple announced that the service is closing May 31st.
Why should Lala users have to waste time and effort working out what to do about the music stored on Lala’s servers which, presumably, disappears into the ether on May 31st? Isn’t it incumbent on Apple, as Lala’s acquirer, to continue to offer the service as designed to the people who had signed up for that service?
At Psonar we offer our users and prospective users this pledge – we will never do anything that denies you perpetual access to your music other than due to events beyond our control. And, if we are forced to change or take down the service, we will do all we can to ensure users get adequate notice (cerainly more than a paltry 31 days) and are given a means to transfer their music elsewhere. We believe that this is the minimum pledge that a service like Psonar should make to its users.
We’re not the only people who think like this! @Project_Felix, @derekbrown, @ItsJimD
Thanks. I’m happy to give psonar a try after the unceremonious dumping by Apple of Lala where I was well vested. Previously I had no axe to grind with Apple even though I use none of their products whatsoever, but now I’m worried about how they are apparently using their power to crush anything that could compete with them and attempt to force users to adopt their platform. I use Foobar2000 to play music,Sansa portable music player and prefer open source formats like flac and ogg to anything proprietary.
Thumbs up!
It was exactly my problem. i hope this community stays a long time!
[...] samples and streams, and so Psonar is a Lala replacement for those who used it mainly as a locker. Martin is critical of the Lala shutdown. Isn’t it incumbent on Apple, as Lala’s acquirer, to continue to offer the service as designed [...]
Hi again Martin,
I note that Psonar is not the only music locker service criticizing Apple/Lala for the shutdown, and offering an alternative:
http://changingway.org/2010/05/17/music-lockers-and-lala-knockers/
Glad to know Psonar wouldn’t do us dirty like Lala did.. It wasn’t that good anyway. Sometimes when I tried to play a song some other random song came out instead..
I’m a Lala refugee somebody suggested psonar on twitter and it’s the only one I found that might be a good replacement. Except I’m on a Mac and need a Mac upload client. Any word on timeline for that?
Somehow I think when Apple comes out with iTunes.com which is Lala re-skinned it will be locked down.
Thanks for your comment. We do have a skeleton app running on Linux and OS X now – and the full version should be released in the next 4-6 weeks. Please sign-up for Psonar now and we’ll keep you posted on the release – we’ll be looking for tech-savvy beta testers!
It’ll be interesting to see what iTunes.com ends up as!
Martin