Music in a Qloud

I have never heard of Qloud until I was browsing through the Facebook applications. If you use Facebook, then this nifty little application will turn your profile page into a nice music lounge.

Qloud hooks up with your iTunes library and gathers any versions of the songs it can find hosted online, while also taking advantage of your iTunes XML file to include such niceties as play counts and the last time you listened a song.

It manages to do this with a plug-in that installs itself on whatever machine your iTunes library resides in. It will periodically check your iTunes XML file, which is the one that has all your track names and metadata for playlist organization, play counts, and song data. It then cross-references this list with any legally hosted versions of the songs online, and will play them with an embedded player right in the app.

While the company says that it take 15-20 minutes for your library to appear after installing the plug-in, I found that it only took about 10 minutes for my 20GBs of music.

I also am a user of Last.fm so it is just as cool seeing the song you just played on iTunes show up on your profile–making Facebook one step closer to having complete control of everything I’m doing. The service is free and plans to release a plug-in for Windows Media player and other platforms in the near future.