I’ve been looking into a backup/space-saving system for my music for quite a while now, debating between iTunes Match, Google Music, mSpot, etc.

I kept reading about Rdio from a lot of MacBook Air users (who use it to save hard drive space on their tiny 64 GB solid state drive) so I decided, now that I have some free time, I’ll give that free trial a go. So, I’ve been messing with Rdio for the last 12 hours.

Rdio is a nifty little service that allows you access to all kinds of artists, albums and songs, letting you search and stream the songs on-the-fly. For a monthly price, of course.

Once you find some songs and albums you like, you can add them to your “collection” for later reference.

It also lets you choose songs to sync offline, in case you’re in a no-data area (or want to save on your data usage if your provider enforces data caps).

I do like how I can tell Rdio to search through my iTunes library and automatically add the songs I own to my Rdio collection. Unfortunately, Rdio isn’t going to find everything, like my precious - and completed - Beatles collection. On top of that, it will find albums and inform me that I only get a preview of the song. This happened all too much with a lot of my favorite oldies. Sure, it found and eagerly gave me the full list of my favorite indie (The Avett Brothers) and obscure (Unknown Mortal Orchestra) bands, no problem. But how can I live with a music collection without Crosby, Stills & Nash? Unthinkable!

Rdio is an amazing service. The idea is great and sounds brilliant on paper, but once I realized there’s a lot of legal workings involved and, as a result, I lose some of my essential artists from my collection due to that, I’m finding it is a service I don’t find worth paying for.

Unfortunately, Rdio is not the solution to my cloud-based music system. I’d really consider it if it could simply accept all my music, not just the new artists.

In the meantime, iTunes Match seems the more likely candidate (and it’s the cheapest, too).

Though… I do eagerly await Spotify’s US release.