TuneWiki rocks music videos on your Google Android phone

Updated: To correct licensing information.

The music player on the Google Android G1 phone isn't bad, but can it scroll lyrics while the song plays, download you new songs for free, and play music videos?

All that is packaged into the free TuneWiki music player, a much more complex and ambitious Android app than most of its cohorts debuting in the Android Market today. Not only does TuneWiki catalog the songs already on your phone, it also supplies you with quick links to download free songs, and links to play videos coupled with lyrics, some licensed.

You can use TuneWiki to create a playlist, listen to top 50 videos and songs, and search for song lyrics in multiple languages. TuneWiki's real ambition shows in its tools to search, save, and play YouTube music videos with synchronized lyrics.

It stumbles slightly, however, with a partial-screen playback of medium quality and song lyrics that don't quite sync if there's a spoken intro. While there is a tool tucked into the context menu to resync lyrics, this wasn't always successful.

Like most apps of our age, TuneWiki has a dorky-cool social-networking aspect. You can search a "music map" to see what people nearby are playing on TuneWiki at any moment, and then click on the anonymous TuneWiki user to see how many other people are playing the song worldwide. As another social-networking spoke, other users can contact you through TuneWiki, anonymously or otherwise, to talk tunes.

In other details, TuneWiki displays some small Google Ads, and you'll need an account to access some features. That's something you have to do online, though, not from the phone.

Regardless of any drawbacks, TuneWiki is one of the highest-reaching music applications we've seen on any mobile platform. It may be somewhat flawed at this stage of development, but it's well worth the download.

Read more CNET news and reviews on Google Android, Android applications, and the T-Mobile G1 phone.