Music players and tools: Nokia Internet Radio, KuGou, Sleep Music, Tunebite, Audio Tuner

Nokia Internet Radio is as simple as a radio. Find a station, click it, and listen.

The radio station directory is easy to navigate, and the number of stations keeps growing.

So far, so good.

But as expected, the programmers at Nokia did a couple of stupid things that were totally unnecessary. For example:

- Why limit the list of favourite stations to 20 entries?
- Why make it impossible to copy a station URL from the station details tab? Are you afraid we'll copy the addresses to a competing radio player?
- And why don't saved radio stations appear in the multimedia menu?

In recent Nokia phones the Nokia Internet Radio program is built into the Radio application. If you have an older Nokia you can download Nokia Internet Radio from:

• Nokia Internet Radio UPDATE: This link is dead. And so is Symbian.


Kugou is a music player that plays many different formats. Of course it plays mp3 and aac, but it also plays wma and the lossless compression format flac. And a lot of other formats too.

The Kugou user interface is translated from chinese to english. The translation looks funny, but it's functional anyway.

But that doesn't make Kugou a good music player. Kugou displays all your music in one big list without filtering by artist, genre, or other mp3 tags. It can sort your files by artist or title, but that doesn't really help you navigate your collection if it's larger than a few dozen songs. If you have a thousand tracks on your memory card, don't expect to find them quickly in Kugou. Especially not if your phone is bitten by the same display bug as mine. Kugou couldn't write the names of the songs in the music list, so they were all displayed as E! instead. All six hundred of them.

My advice: forget about Kugou for the time being, and use TTPod until PowerMP3 is ready.

• Kugou (english version) on Mobile Castle UPDATE: This link is dead. And so is Symbian.


Sleep Music is a timer program that can switch off the built in music player of your phone after it has played you to sleep. It can switch off the radio application too. The latest version of Sleep Music can shut down TTPod or LCG Jukebox or any other application. Sleep Music can even switch off your phone for you.

• Sleep Music 1.05 at Mobile Castle UPDATE: This link is dead. And so is Symbian.


Tunebite plays tracks at high speed and records them to a file. That file will play back at normal speed, of course.

Why would you want to do that? Imagine you've downloaded some tracks from Nokia's "comes with music" store. Those files are crippled by DRM, so it's really hard to make 'em work on another phone. Or iPod or computer or any device other than the Nokia that you used to get those tracks. Tunebite turns 'em into normal mp3 files that you can play without any restrictions anytime anywhere.

Tunebite is expensive (30 euros for the full version when I checked today), but the makers of Tunebite got a taste of their own: the Tunebite DRM has been removed as well.

• Tunebite to remove DRM from music, audiobooks, and video (expensive) UPDATE: This link is dead. And so is Symbian.
• Tunebite with its own DRM removed (for BitTorrent, very cheap :) UPDATE: This link is dead. And so is Symbian.


Audio Tuner turns your phone into a guitar tuner. And a piano tuner. And a bass tuner And you can use it to tune other instruments as well.

Audio Tuner displays the target frequency as a green line, then records your guitar string or whatever sound you feed into your phone mic, and displays the recorded frequency spectrum as a red line. Keep pulling the strings 'till the green and red lines overlap and you're tuned.

• Audio Tuner