MOG hits the Mac; Google Music goes mobile Safari

Battling over the best music technology: subscription services and cloud players

While it’s been fairly silent on the music technology front--even with San Francisco’s MusicTech Summit going down right after the weekend--two updates rolled out today remind us that the war over users’ ears still rages on.

MOG for Mac

Over a year after launching on the iPhone, MOG has arrived on the Mac.

This is big news since it brings MOG up to speed with several of its competitors. Rdio, for example, has had its Mac client out in the wild since March and Spotify, which just launched stateside this past summer, has had a native application from day one.

Though it arrives on the scene a bit late, MOG for Mac will not disappoint. The application works just the way a native app should, supporting media keys on the keyboard (play, pause, skip, previous, volume) as well as the Apple remote, so controlling the music is as simple as using iTunes. And, just like in iTunes, users can take advantage of AirPlay to stream music from MOG to Apple TV, Airport Express or any other AirPlay-supported devices.

Until now, Mac users had to access mobile either through the Web browser (which was no shabby experience) or on mobile. Windows users will have to wait just a bit longer as MOG for PC has just entered the beta testing stage.

MOG is free to try for 14 days, after which users must pay $10 per month for an all-you-can stream subscription.

Google Music on mobile

Even though there’s still no Google Music available in the App Store, iPhone and other iOS users can now access the cloud music service via an HTML5 app in the browser.

As shown in the top row, you can navigate through your library by artist, album, song, playlist, or genre. Once you select one, it’s just a matter of scrolling down to that “Herbie Hancock” or “nu-disco” or whatever else you want to play.

I’m sad to report, however, that the app is almost unusable. While it’s not very clunky (the app is actually quite nice looking), every tap and every scroll registers seconds late, causing one to unintentionally navigate to the wrong menu or slide too quickly past names. The app actually crashed twice before I actually managed to play the song I wanted.

(Note: I was testing it out on an iPhone 3G S connected to a fast, reliable WiFi network. Perhaps, iPhone 4 users will have an easier time.)

Either way, Google Music is still in beta and this is a brand new mobile service, so we’ll cut them some slack. If Google wants to best major competitors like Apple and Amazon, however, it’s going to have to do better.

MOG image sources.