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lala extremely flawed

A week ago I wrote about how I used web apps to feed into other web apps, more specifically I talked about lala and it’s “lala music mover”.

Recently a thought formed; while watching how lala’s music mover worked, I noticed that it wasn’t checking anything other than the ID3 tag. I ran a real quick experiment.

To test this out, I found a song that I didn’t already have. “Fireflies” by “Owl City” seemed a great fit. I made a clean iTunes library, created a sample mp3 and added it to iTunes. Then, I just edited the ID3 tag to match some basic information about the Fireflies track. Finally I made the lala mover rescan my library. Surprisingly when I checked lala, they had added it to my library.

What does this teach us? The lala mover does nothing but check for ID3 tags. But really, I just saved 10¢. It’s not possible to download the track from lala being that they think I already own the track.

lala-fireflies lala-fireflies-none itunes-sample-mp3 ID3-sample ID3-firefly itunes-firefly lal-mover lala-fireflies-have