PowerMP3 squashes some bugs and shows artists everywhere

PowerMP3 plays music in mp3, ogg, aac, and mp4 format, and m3u playlists too. It comes with a sleeptimer, an equaliser, an "exclude" option for small files and files of low bitrate (to keep your ringtones out of your music library), album art display, and it can download album art for you. It sorts your music by mp3 tags and folder structure.

The latest edition fixes a bug in the sleep timer, and lets you edit the keypad functions if you know how to edit xml files. A very welcome change is that PowerMP3 now shows the names of artists everywhere. In the playlists, all over the music library, and in the play queue. That's a big improvement, because it's often quite difficult to identify songs by their title alone.

PowerMP3 is still in beta testing, and you can use the test versions for free. So get a copy before Mobifactor starts asking money. If you try to install the latest version of PowerMP3 on top of an older version and it doesn't work, try uninstalling the older version first. If the old version refuses to go away just switch your phone off and back on.

The beta test should continue for a while. Not only because it means we can keep using the program for free, but also because there are still things left to fix. For example, the music library sorts your music by artist, album, and genre, but it ignores the composer tag. Newer Nokias have a Navi wheel for easy scrolling, but you can't use it to scroll through lists of songs in PowerMP3. And PowerMP3 still has problems with m3u playlists that it didn't generate itself. If you've made m3u playlists with WinAmp or edited them with Symbian's built-in music player, PowerMP3 refuses to pick up the changes, and it ignores songs if the names contain characters like ã, é, ç, etc. So if your playlists have french or brazilian music, don't expect PowerMP3 to play them right.

• PowerMP3 v1.11 at Mobile Castle

Older versions of PowerMP:

• PowerMP3 v1.10 at Mobile Castle
• PowerMP3 v1.09 at Ziddu
• PowerMP3 v1.08 at Mobile Castle
• PowerMP3 v1.07 at Mobile Castle
• PowerMP3 v1.06 at Mobile Castle
• PowerMP3 v1.05 at Mobile Castle
• PowerMP3 beta 2 at Mobile Castle
• PowerMP3 beta 2 at Mobifactor