The idea for this software is great. It streams your iTunes songs to your phone. But sadly Melodeo's nuTsie is stuck with restrictions that only an entertainment industry copyright lawyer could love, making it a somewhat awkward way to access "your" music.

Here's the thing: nuTsie does not actually stream your iTunes songs to your phone. That would be way too easy. If the company actually streamed directly from iTunes, it would run up hard against Apple's terms of service restrictions. So Melodeo bought up a whole lot of songs and stored them on a central server; it will stream them to your phone like a radio station.

There are two big catches to this approach. First, you can play only songs from the overlap between the list nuTsie owns and the list you own. That's because the company is not playing "your" music, it's playing the subset of its music that's in your iTunes library. The two lists probably won't match.

Second and more irritatingly, the laws surrounding Web radio prohibit nuTsie from letting you choose individual songs. Instead, you must play entire playlists sequentially or shuffled.

Let's step back a little and explain how this service really works. Basically, you must sign up on a Web site, nutsie.com. You somewhat awkwardly export your iTunes library, using an iTunes menu option, to an XML file and upload it to the nuTsie site. NuTsie looks at the tracks in your library, looks at its own library, and gives you a personal Web page showing all of your playlists, but including only the songs that both you and it own.

If you want to play the music on your PC, stop here, and hit "play" on the embedded player in the Web page. So far, so good, and the music streams at 128 Kbps and sounds fine. If you want to play tunes on your phone, you give nuTsie your phone number, and the company sends you a text message with a download link for a Java application that automatically logs into your list of playlists.

There's no way to edit the list of playlists or make it a part of your full iTunes library without some hand-coding in XML. And if you update anything on iTunes, you have to export and upload your whole library again. (Melodeo said it's working on both of these issues.)

NuTsie is right now approved for about a dozen AT&T and Sprint phones, though it will work on others. I tried it on a Motorola RAZR V3xx, a Nokia N75, and an LG CU500. On the RAZR and the N75, the application installed easily, giving me quick access to my playlists. On the CU500, the screen display was distorted when I played songs, and the phone kept asking—every 30 seconds!—for my permission to access the Internet, which made the app really annoying to use.

NuTsie had many of my songs, but many were missing. Albums missing included the Cure's Disintegration, Paul Simon's Concert in the Park, Barenaked Ladies' Maroon, and Joy Division's Substance. Folks, these aren't all that obscure. Melodeo said it's buying songs as fast as it can, and that, within a few weeks, its library will be at least five times as large as it was when I tried it.

I was also disappointed, when I played the music, in the audio quality. The music sounded fine over the V3xx's and N75's built-in speakers. But when we plugged in a pair of good Plantronics MHS-213 earbuds, drums and cymbals had a hideous "splashing" sound I associate with very low-bit-rate compression. Yup—nuTsie is streaming at 24 Kbps AAC+, which would make sense over a slower network, but not on the HSDPA network that the V3xx uses. In addition, my songs hiccupped every 65 to 67 seconds, which was very irritating. Melodeo acknowledged that problem and said it's working to fix it.

Since nuTsie is a Java app, its behavior is also limited by some phone restrictions. For example, if you flip the RAZR closed, nuTsie turns off. But if you flip the N75 closed, it happily stays running. This is a phone problem, not a nuTsie problem.

It's hard to spit in a free application's face. NuTsie does try to stream to you some semblance of the iTunes playlists you have at home. But it won't turn your phone into an iPhone, and it's still decidedly in beta. Melodeo needs to beef up its list of songs, improve audio quality, and make the connection to iTunes smoother for this to be a real winner.