GigaOM briefly noted late yesterday that Apple has added 30-second song samples to its browser-based iTunes Preview pages that quietly appeared several months ago. The report notes that Apple is serving the previews, which are encoded in 44.1 KHz AAC format at 300+ kbps, via QuickTime.

The addition is a likely benefit of Apple's recent acquisition of Lala Media, a popular web-based streaming media company. Prior to its acquisition by Apple, Lala had reached a deal with Google to provide song samples in Google search results.