Google Music Labs Launched!

There are only three labs, but hot damn are they awesome! One lab switches from using Flash to play mp3s to HTML5, one switches the Thumbs up/down rating system to a 5 star rating system, and the last provides pop-up notifications of the current song playing.

I have dearly missed my star ratings from iTunes, as I found the simple thumbs up/down to be far too simple. Who even has a lot of “thumbs down” in their library anyways? Personally, I scaled my iTunes ratings to where 2 stars meant average, giving much more fine tuning as to which songs I enjoy more than others. Now if they would just add in more Auto Playlist options for ratings and I’ll be set!

The other awesome lab is HTML5 audio instead of Flash. I’m looking forward to no more Flash crashes and better battery life.

Now here’s to hoping that the next Lab to come out is native Last.fm Scrobbling!