MP3 man getting into mobile music

YET ANOTHER mobile music service has sprung up to challenge the likes of Omnifone and Gracenote. The creator of Mp3tunes - Michael Robertson - says his service is real not vapourware.

He's referring, of course, to Carstars - a 'concept device' which Gracenote and Omnifone showed off at CES. He even claims that Clarion will be shipping a car music system that will support Mp3tunes next month (February).

INQ readers may be aware of Mr Robertson who made his name by creating Mp3.com and managed to get himself sued (unsuccessfully) by EMI last year over the mp3tunes service.

The best bit is that Mp3tunes offers a number of ways to transfer your personal music collection to a mobile phone. One of the options is to use a module called Load2mobile.

This enables you to send a track from your PC directly to your mobile phone. Effectively what happens is that you upload the track to your own personal Mp3tunes locker.

Mp3tunes then sends you a direct link to that track (in your locker) in the form of a URL embedded into a text message. There's even an option to send the track in medium quality so you don't have to download so much data.

Incidentally although the Mp3tunes service is US based, it is still possible to send tracks to UK mobile phones. For some reason, however, Mp3tunes claims this service won't work with the Apple Ithingey.

This may be a reference to another module which the company offers (and is still in beta) called Mobilesync. This is a Java app which will run on most musicphones.

Once you've loaded Mobilesync, it's possible to send files directly from you locker to the phone and sync your musicphone with your locker.

Naturally, Mp3tunes recommends you make sure your mobile phone has an 'all-you-can-eat' data plan otherwise this could prove a very expensive activity. µ