Want to listen to your personal music collection through Xbox Music? Microsoft has just unveiled its take on an online music locker, allowing people to store their personal music files in OneDrive and then listen to them over on Xbox Music. This is akin to what Apple offers with iTunes Match and Google with Play Music, however it's a bifurcated approach. Where those services make local files accessible through a single cloud service, Microsoft's approach makes files available through both OneDrive and Xbox Music, one for storage and one for listening. It's not necessarily a better or worse approach — just different.

All songs have to stay in OneDrive's Music folder

Rather than scanning your local files like other music storage services do, Microsoft requires that you choose which files you want by uploading them to a specific Music folder on OneDrive. Only those files will be synced with Xbox Music, and they'll disappear if you ever remove them. The downside to this is that every song eats into your OneDrive storage space, but Microsoft gives every Xbox Music subscriber 100GB of extra space in OneDrive, so you probably aren't going to run out. You can, however, still play back stored files in Xbox Music if you aren't a subscriber.

Microsoft is making the service available in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, among over a dozen other countries today. You'll be able to listen to music stored in OneDrive so long as you're using Xbox Music on a Windows 8.1 device, an Xbox, or the web. If you're on Android or iOS, you're out of luck for now.