If you want to have access to your expansive music library at all times, but can’t fit your entire song collection onto any smartphone, a streaming music service is probably your best bet. There are a lot of streaming music services out there, but if you want access to your own music, you’re options are drastically fewer. That’s where mSpot for Android comes in. The still-in-beta mSpot service takes your own digital music and uploads it to the mSpot cloud. From there, the service will stream your own music back down to you (over the air) on demand. It’s actually a really slick way to access gargantuan libraries without having to shell out the mega-bucks for high-capacity microSD cards.
We had a chance to demo mSpot and we have to say that the idea is solid. Rather then stream music from their own music portfolio, mSpot gives you the ability to access your own songs from anywhere in the world – all without having to keep your computer running at home. It works by uploading your files to the web. Then, with the mSpot Android app installed on your Android smartphone, you can connect to that cloud and pull songs down at will. The app will even cache recently played songs so that you always have access to music, even when you’re out of range of a wireless data network. It’s a sort of hybrid streaming/caching service – which is really cool.
The mSpot service also monitors your Mac or PC to changes in your music library – like, say, if you add or delete or edit a playlist in iTunes. Those changes are reflected in the cloud-based library as well. The overall experience is akin to having your music in three places at the same time – on your desktop, on your smartphone, and in the cloud.
So, what’s not so good? The bitrate. To allow mSpot to work in all wireless coverage scenarios, the songs are transcoded into a really low bitrate upon uploading to the cloud – which translates into about 30% of the audio information available in a typical 128-196kbps MP3. You probably won’t notice the quality degradation on headphones, but if you’re playing them through your car speakers or at home, you’re probably going to have problems. mSpot says they will offer higher-quality streaming options in the near future, but still only about 75% the quality of a standard MP3.
All in all, though. If you need tunes and you don’t have space, mSpot is a good solution.