MediaMaster Take 2

A couple of days ago I mentioned a new service that I found called MediaMaster. I have since spent some time playing with the service and trying out the features. I've uploaded several albums and decided that it was time for an update. The service responds very quickly and I was very pleased to discover that I could upload a track and play a different track at the same time. Not everyone will think that this is a great feature but I was surprised. I rather expected to have to wait until the track was done. Being as its a 2 hour clip I would have been in for a bit of a wait. The user interface while feeling a bit too much like iTunes is clean and efficient. The organization of the music is somewhat clunky and it took me a minute or two to figure out that you had to drag songs around in order to add them to a playlist. On the whole I found this service to feature top notch quality, my 320kbps tracks still sound top notch and the included freebie tracks are encoded at 192kbps and sound like it too. I believe that this service has tons of potential. One feature that I would like to see and fits well with the intended future concept of being a more social oriented site is the ability to "tag" my music collection. Anyone who spends time blogging or on various social networking sites is very familiar with this process and I have found that it can be a very effective method of organization. I intend to experiment with the embeded and streaming audio features that MediaMaster offers soon.

I intend to keep an eye on this company. If they can find a method to over come the biggest roadblock in their future then I believe that they will have a very bright future indeed. That roadblock is the recording industry. While we all know that the recording industry's current business model is flawed and falling apart it still has much more money and power than a small startup like MediaMaster. It will be interesting to see how this issue is handled in the future especially with the concepts of being able to listen to other users music and such. If MediaMaster were to get some artists or labels on board using the site much like myspace has been able to become a haven for indie bands first and main stream bands later they might just have a good shot. Stay tuned I'm sure the ride will be fun.