GLOBAL – Internet radio player Soundtracker was first released on Nokia Beta Labs nearly a year ago, though the roots of the app go back a lot further than that. The app has seen a lot of progress over the course of the year – and the latest batch of updates sees the Symbian iteration of the app reach version 1.7.2 and the Series 40 version reach 1.7.

If you haven’t tried it yet, then it’s probably time to take a look. If you have, then it’s worth reassessing the app in the light of the latest improvements.

Here’s what it does. You type in the name of an artist you like and it can create a radio station that plays music by that artist and others of a similar type. There’s a library of more than 10 million fully licensed of songs behind the service, so finding new music that’s to your taste should be easy.

So far so good, but you have probably seen similar services as web apps over recent years.

Soundtracker goes quite a bit further than this, though. For a start, it’s on your mobile phone. Then it also allows you to share your stations with friends through social media. If your friends are also Soundtracker users, you can see their stations and location through the app – these settings are user-controllable, though, if you’d really rather keep those things private.

The other interesting part is that this is geo-social radio. It can find stations created by users close to you. That’s especially important if your musical tastes have a local side to them. You can easily tap into music from your own country and region and completely avoid the international top-hits. 

Of course, as with any streaming media, you should be careful with this app if you aren’t on WiFi or an unlimited 3G contract. Other than that it’s free thanks to ad-support.

Have you tried out the latest version yet? What do you think?