Top mobile music apps

Posted by Gareth Beavis on Mon 17 Nov 2008

Sounds essential - the best apps to tune up your mobile phone.

Where has all the noise gone? Perhaps somebody has finally thrown the kids at the back playing tinny drum ‘n’ bass under the wheels of the bus? Perhaps your MP3 player has run out of battery?

No, you’ve just got so bored of the music on your mobile that your subconscious has shut it off without even telling you. But fear not, as we have a guide to all the best music apps that will load up your phone with the hippest, hoppest tunes you can lay your digital fingers on.

Last.fm
Get it for: iPhone
What it does: Those that are aware of the power of Last.fm and have an iPhone or iPod touch will be downloading this app straight away. While it basically gives you all the power of the streaming behemoth on your handset, the only problem is it won’t run in the background to let you get on with other important iPhoney jobs.

Pocket Scrobbler / Mobbler
Get it for: Windows Mobile / S60
What it does: Last.fm’s far reaching influence into the musical lives of mobile phone users means that every different kind of platform needs to be serviced. These apps allow you to interact in a similar way with your Last.fm account, without needing to buy a whole new handset to do so.

Musicstation
Get it for: S60
What it does: Allows you to give Vodafone £2 a week and get a penny change, and receive all the music you can fill your handset with. In fact, keep on filling, as Musicstation uses intelligent memory management to store tracks, so you never run out of space to download new music. The service even works over GPRS, so the tunes will just keep on rolling no matter where you are.

Shazam
Get it for: Android / iPhone
What it does: Allows you to hold your phone up to any track for a few seconds and almost instantly find out what it is. Beware though, pub landlords have cottoned on to this and made the ‘music snippets’ round of the pub quiz even shorter to compensate.

imeem
Get it for: Android
What it does: Connects the user to their imeem social networking account, allowing them to ‘favourite’ certain artists and listen to samplings of their music on tailor-made stations. Similar to Last.fm, it connects with the Amazon MP3 function on the G1 handset to allow users to purchase MP3s they can download for keeps.

allRadio
Get it for: iPhone
What it does: Gives you a bevy of internet radio stations to choose from, so if you’re hankering after some juicy Dixieland interpreted by Japanese metal-heads, then it’s probably on one of the 2000 stations listed.

Slacker
Get it for: BlackBerry OS 4.3 and later
What it does: Similar to Last.fm in the fact it streams music to your handset, giving you a free personalised music service on your handset. It allows you to skip six tracks an hour, so it will force the musically polygamous among you to really start listening. Plus it will stay ad-free until next year according to RIM.

TunesSync
Get it for: BlackBerry OS
What it does: It allows you to copy across all the tunes you want from iTunes onto your BlackBerry (memory card size permitting, of course). Although this was possible in a hacking fashion before, this app means your custom playlists you spent weeks agonising over will appear on your ‘Berry too.

Nokia’s Comes with Music
Get it for: Branded Nokia handsets
What it does: Basically gives you unlimited music from four major record labels for the 12 or 18 months, depending on your contract length.

However, it’s only available on two handsets at the moment (though the 5800 XpressMusic is coming soon) and once the contract is finished, although you can keep listening to the tracks on your old phone, you can’t transfer them anywhere else unless you buy another CWM Nokia phone.

Midomi Mobile
Get it for: S60
What it does: Allows you to whistle, hum and burble songs down you mobile phone, and the patented Multimodal Adaptive Recognition System (MARS) identifies the tracks and lets you not only know what they are, but searches through sites like YouTube to let you watch the relevant music video.