One of the great pleasures of Nokia’s latest phones, we’ve found, is the truly superior quality of their audio – better than even the most popular music-only players, we’re quite sure. Listening to music on our N97 is a real treat – through headphones, of course, but also when piped through our home stereo and even when transmitted to the car radio via FM.

Of course, there’s no substitute for good live music. And that brings us to Gig Finder, an app recently developed by Nokia itself for Series 60, 5th Edition-based phones. Just emerging from several months of testing, over at Nokia Beta Labs this app lists musical events in major cities and surrounding towns in the U.S. and in a growing number of other nations.

But Gig Finder does more than simply enumerate musical listings like an ad in the newspaper. Based on your profile – where you live, your favorite artists, bands and musical genres, etc. – the software can automatically identify upcoming performances that will likely be of interest. For the most popular venues and artists, Gig Finder can help you to buy tickets for concerts and, from Nokia’s own online music store, pre-recorded music tracks, too. Finally, it can help you to share your findings with your circle of friends.

It’s not clear what the source of Gig Finder’s concert information is, but the app strikes us as fairly well informed. During a try-out in Sonoma County, California, it displayed not only concerts at major venues in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, both an hour’s drive away or more, but also many gigs scheduled for bars just down the road. For many of these local joints, what’s more, the app provided a paragraph or two of description – what kind of food is served and so forth – provided by its owners.

Gig Finder’s events calendar can be searched by act, by city, by venue, by date, and by musical genre. (As a genre, “classical” doesn’t seem to be the app’s strong suit.) Evidently, the app is able, by itself, to determine your phone’s home location so as to supply information about the most relevant events. If you’re on the road, however, you can search in and around a specific city. Search for a genre – ska, for instance – without specifying a location, however, and the app will show you gigs scheduled for way far away, even across the ocean. (Casting such a large net may well appeal, of course, to particularly fanatical fans.)

Once you find an event that strikes your fancy, you can select it for inclusion in a list of “My Gigs.” This makes it easily viewable as well as making a note of it in your phone’s built-in calendar. The app will show the venue on Ovi Maps, as well. And in some cases, the app can help you to buy tickets, either by setting up a phone call to the appropriate box office or by connecting you to that seller’s website.

Meanwhile, the app is always trying its best to profile your musical tastes to help make accurate recommendations. While you can build your own profile by typing in the names of favorite artists, the app is also programmed to glean the names of artists of any musical tracks stored in your phone. As an option, Gig Finder may be set to run in the background, in which case it can alert you on your home screen to newly listed gigs that to some degree match your profile.

How well this profiling works is difficult to tell; we’ll bet it takes some time to kick in – and a larger number of tracks than we happen to have stored in our phone – to make a major difference. In the meantime, the app indicates a level of relevancy for each recommendation it offers.

Sharing events with friends is easy, too: A click of the app’s Share button followed by Facebook automatically connects you to that service (assuming you have account there) and creates a new Event page. Or, you can click on the SMS or E-mail buttons to quickly send word via those channels.

All in all, we’re quite impressed with Gig Finder – with the design of its user-interface and with the richness of the information it provides. Clearly, somebody has been doing their homework. We do wish we could see where the event data is coming from; if nothing else, venue owners wishing to get listed would likely appreciate this information. We also can imagine seeing the app supply links to bands’ MySpace pages and websites so that we might get a better taste of unfamiliar music. And we could see links being offered to online reviews, too, and perhaps even a way for Gig Finder users to post their own reviews – though all that might lead to a thicket of difficult choices concerning whose work to display, etc.

In any case, this app is off to a great start. And its price in Ovi Store – free – is just one more reason it won’t get in the way of your enjoying your Nokia’s hi-fi audio.

Gig Finder is free to download from Ovi Store, and is available in several countries around the world.