mSpot Enables Cloud Syncing With iTunes But It’s Not Quite Ready For Primetime

The rumors have been circling for quite a while about an official iTunes cloud solution that makes streaming your music anywhere at anytime a reality. While we do think it’s inevitable that iTunes will one day ride the cloud, those who are getting impatient now have an unofficial option.

mSpot is that option. An app that has been around for a while on other platforms, but just recently landed on the iPhone.
mSpot makes all of your unfulfilled fantasies about iTunes cloud storage come true; right now you can store 2GB of your music, and download the official mPlayer app free of charge. For those of you with larger music collections (note: like, everyone), mSpot offers you a fairly generous 40GB worth of storage for $3.99 a month…

How It Works

To get the whole shebang working, you’ll need to download the mSpot client to your computer and setup a new account. The client runs in the background and performs tasks like monitoring your iTunes library, and of course uploading music to the cloud.
All of your file management is done via a browser window. I did notice that mSpot is a bit taxing on system resources, but that may just be because I’m using a Chrome beta browser.

Next you’ll need to download the iPhone app, and enter the same account info you entered into the desktop client, and from there it just works. You can choose to have the app download each song and store it in cache, or you can choose the streaming only option.
Even when going the streaming only route over 3G, my music played fairly quickly.

Not Quite Ready For Primetime

Overall, mSpot works decently, but it’s a somewhat unpolished experience thus far. For one, there’s a noticeable lack of landscape support, which takes things down another couple of notches, along with jerky touch functionality.

Lastly, the desktop app isn’t very intuitive at all, and the syncing itself seems to suffer from a few bugs when it comes to filtering the music you want to sync.
mSpot is an okay app to take for a spin, if nothing more than to see what iTunes will be like once it finally does feature cloud syncing. For those of you who are really serious about the cloud, you’d be better off waiting until Apple comes along with a more polished product.
You can download mSpot today from the App Store for free. Will you give it a go?
UPDATE: Uninstalling and reinstalling a few times made the backgrounding work like it should, so I’ve removed that note in the article.