Stop me if you've heard this one before, because I haven't.
The Mog music subscription service updated its iPhone app on Monday, introducing a strange new "experimental/beta" feature called Moggles, which lets you take a picture of an album in order to load it in the Mog app for playback, downloading, and so on.
Basically, it's a way to rip an entire CD to your Mog account in a few seconds.
Out record shopping? Moggle the album and it's yours. Just about ready to finally sell your CD collection, assuming you can find anyone who still wants to buy it? If you're a Mog subscriber ($10/month for the mobile app), you now have a nifty way to port all that plastic into the cloud.
As Mog admits with a warning within the app that says "may produce inaccurate or hilarious results," this feature is still experimental, and a quick test of promo CDs that have arrived at my office over the years revealed that it's not yet perfect.
Admirably, the Mog app's Moggles feature identified my promo version of Dear Science as being by TV on the Radio -- even though the promo version's album cover differs from that of the released version. However, we ended up with the wrong "TV" on the wrong "Radio.".
Moggles also yielded no match for a Conor Oberst solo record (Gentleman's Pact) that also arrived on my desk one day, but when we tried Herman Dune's Next Year in Zion, we witnessed the true magic of Moggles.
One quick snapshot with the Mog app's Moggles feature, and there it was, on our iPhone, ready to be added to our play queue or favorites or downloaded onto our phone.
Yes, in mere seconds, we had ripped a CD with an iPhone camera, stored it in our cloud music account on Mog, and commenced it downloading to our iPhone.
In addition to Moggles, the new Mog app adds support for the service's 320 Kbps music files, so now, you can stream the highest-quality MP3s directly to your nice sounding home stereo speakers via the app's Apple AirPlay support.