iPhone App of the Week: myTtuner

When a duff song came on the radio in the halcyon days of analogue – a Status Quo number say, or anything mutliated by the vocal chords of the Scouse songstress Sonya – one was forced to twiddle an over-sized tuning dial and manually seek out audio salvation on an alternative station. As ever, the internet solves all, this time in the form of iPhone App of the Week, myTtuner (which we suspect is a play on the phrase “mighty tuner”).

MyTtuner scans hundreds of internet radio stations, detects which song is currently being played on each, and then offers up an enormous list of artists to take your pick from. At any one time, there are dozens to choose from, literally ranging from Abba to ZZ Top.

MyTtuner only lists songs that are about to be played or have just started, so although the song might be underway by the time you’ve made your selection from the alphabetically ordered jukebox, you’re still going to hear the vast majority of the song. The list of tracks on offer updates every minute to avoid the crushing disappointment of arriving for only the last few bars of Brothers In Arms.

Better still, you can select up to ten artists or song titles to put into the app’s search engine, so you can see at a glance when one of your favourites is being given airtime. For popular artists such as The Beatles or Bowie, you can practically guarantee there’ll be a new song along every minute; you’ll be hanging around a while longer for Antony Costa – proof indeed that the internet isn’t all bad.

Aside from providing the option to purchase playing tracks in iTunes, myTtuner also lists a barrage of information about your current tune, including the album cover and full track listings for all the albums that song appears on. And if scanning a long list of artists isn’t your idea of fun, you can simply take your pick from the enormous range of stations listed by genre in the Radio menu.

Clearly, myTtuner isn’t as flexible as Spotify or the soon to be subscriber-only Last.Fm – it requires a little more manual intervention to find the tunes you want to hear. But the delight of myTtuner is its random serendipity: the joy of scanning down a list and picking that old Stereo MCs number, just because it happens to be playing at precisely that moment on a radio station in Sweden that you’ve never heard of.  And if that’s not worth 59p (avoid the free version – it scans a mere fraction of the available stations), money really is too tight to mention.

Want more iPhone apps? Try our 73 best iPhone Apps feature or our previous iPhone Apps of the Week.