PCMag.Com - Best Buy has "soft launched" a cloud music service, but other, better options are already available. In fact, don't even bother trying this out until Best Buy reworks it.I tried out the Best Buy Music Cloud powered by Catch Media's Play Anywhere software on Tuesday, and found the software inflexible, and painful, and with some odd design decisions, to boot. The worst choice? For now, you're restricted to listening to 30-second samples of your own songs.
And Best Buy may listen. After publishing this hands-on, I asked Robert Stephens, the chief technical officer of Best Buy, to explain the 30-second decision. "[T]otally fair. I actually use and love Napster on my iOS and Sonos. I plan to check this out. Will fwd your comments on," he said via Twitter.
For now, I'd recommend instead trying out consider competing cloud music services, such as Apple's iTunes in the iCloud, MSpot Music, Amazon Cloud Player, or Google Music.
At this point, Best Buy's best source of details about Best Buy Music Cloud remains its blog post from earlier this month, that describes how the service will be launched in both a free "Lite" version, as well as a upcoming Pro upgrade. Given the lack of payment options during the installation process, I assume that what I tried out was the Lite version.
First of all, fair warning: if you're a Windows user and dislike Apple's iTunes software, stop reading, if you haven't already. After going through the short installation process (which consists of entering a username and password, and then downloading the software for either Mac OS X or Windows) users are then asked to scan the Apple iTunes folder. Unlike competing cloud music services, there is no option to upload from a Windows Media Player playlist or just a generic music folder. More
