When Apple bought streaming music service Lala, speculation was that the company intended to work on a Web interface for iTunes. Lala's engineers would certainly have had the expertise, and the company had an interesting approach to the concept of owning songs--users could buy "web albums" which gave them unlimited streaming rights but no downloads or physical copies.

Now there's more reason to suspect that the company intends to make a Web interface for iTunes. Cupertino is hiring a user interface engineer for a position that could be tailored to the project. The job description says the engineer will be "responsible for implementing interactive, rich media projects within the iTunes group" and proceeds to list familiarity with a number of Web technologies as qualifications.

I hope we will see a Web interface for iTunes. I loved Lala's vision of how users would want to consume music, and it's time for Apple to move forward from the mp3 player model. Users today are connected to the Internet more than ever, and we need music services that take full advantage of this.

I've been worrying about the fate of Lala ever since it was acquired by Apple last week. The speculation I've read seems split between thinking that Apple intends to embrace the company's long-term vision, creating a powerful Web-based version of iTunes, and suggestions that Apple only bought the service to poke Googlein the eye.

I first discovered Lala months ago, thanks to a deal it struck with Google, which put the service at the top of music-related search results.

When you create an account and log in, you can listen to any song in full once for free. If you want to listen to it again, you can either buy a physical CD, which also grants you permission to stream the song online, download the mp3, or pay 10 cents to buy a "web song". The web song lets you the stream the song as much as you want, from anywhere.

Web songs are exactly how I want to listen to music. I don't listen while I'm walking or commuting, but I do listen while I'm at a computer, and I want a synced service that gives me access to my songs no matter where I am. I'm happy to pay for this, and 10 cents per song is a great example of micropayments at their best--each song feels cheap, and I find I want to buy a lot of them.

Since music formats do change, what I'd really like to do is buy the rights to a song for life and have a company store it for me. But it's been hard to trust even established companies to make music available over an extended period of time. For example, when Microsoft's MSN Music store died last year the company's plans to stop running the licensing servers that authorized users to play the DRM-protected songs proved highly controversial.

For now, I'm left holding my breath over the fate of this excellent music service.

At Apple's press event yesterday, Steve Jobs, the company's CEO, announced a number of new gadgets, including a tiny video iPod and a touch-screen iPod with Wi-Fi capabilities. But a newly announced iTunes feature caught my eye: the make-your-own ringtone function. Apple has not only made it easy to buy music online; it has also made it easy for a user to create a short snippet of that song to play on her phone--a ringtone--and buy it from Apple.

The idea of making it simple for people to create their own ringtones is obviously a good one, and to charge for it is smart. After all, ringtones are usually downloaded for more than $2 each, while Apple's ringtone costs $0.99 to $1.98 for the song and $0.99 to convert it into a ringtone file. But it's still hard to shake the feeling that by making a ringtone with iTunes, you're paying again for a song that you've already bought. (For a comical take on this idea, here's an article from the Onion.)

A few months ago, I got frustrated with the measly ringtone selection on my phone, and I was not in the mood to pay for other options, so I decided to make my own. It's not that hard, actually. First, I picked out a couple of songs from my iTunes collection that I thought would make good ringtones, and then I made sure that they didn't have any DRM (digital rights management) software on them. The songs that I ripped from CDs were free of DRM, but songs that I bought from iTunes needed to be burned to a CD and then ripped back to iTunes in order to make them clean. Then I imported the music files, one at a time, to Audacity--free audio-editing software--where I cut out snippets. I didn't try to compress the files, and they came out at a couple of hundred kilobytes, which is quite large for a ringtone and actually might not work for many phones with limited memory (MP3 compression software is available online, and it can shrink the files much smaller). To transfer the files to my phone, I used the Bluetooth connection from my Macbook Pro and Motorola Rokr. Then, under my phone's settings, I selected the music file I had just transferred as the ringtone.