Music Players

Royale with Cheese

Any thoughts on the best music player app for Android at the moment? I searched for a thread on this and didn't really find anything concrete. I thought it would be useful to have a decent comparison thread for all the music player apps out there as it's one of the main reasons I got a smart phone (my mp3 player had died and my phone at the time was shít, made sense to get something to play music on). Maybe people can use this thread to post up reviews of the different players they've used.

I've gone through the main free ones and have recently settled on Music PlayerPro.

Cubed




Very popular on this forum. Flick through your music using a cube style interface. Demonstration of how the interface works in the video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm-ezu7AE5s

Pros:

It looks very cool, the cube idea is original.

I never really had any playback issues with it, and very rarely a force close.

Cons:

I'm not sure it's all that practical, it's quicker and easier to look through your music in a list style view. Of course you can switch the interface to a simple list, but it's extremely boring.

The album art it downloads automatically is often not great quality and you have to manually update each album to get better quality images.

Main one for me, and the reason I stopped using it, is that after the froyo update flicking through the cube began to lag quite badly. There wasn't much point for me in using it without a fluid interface, and that was about the only real thing going for this app.

Lockscreen widget never worked properly for me. Also could do with a tag editor and equaliser.

Every now and then it'll ask you to donate money to the developer. Less annoying than constant ads I know, still pissed me off whenever I saw it.

Overall:

A nice original player but I think it's fairly overrated by a lot of people. The cube isn't as easy to use as a list/grid interface. I know that cubed supports both these kinds of interfaces but I think there are better apps out there at doing this. Would probably be still using it though if froyo hadn't brought about the lag.


PlayerPro




I bought this for €1.99 the other day just for the sake of buying a paid app really, liked it so much I decided to keep it. More traditional interface, list or grid view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1U9WBUakAk

Pros:

It's just a very nice interface. The only thing I like about ipods/iphones really is the 'slickness' of the interface. While this is still a long way off ipod, its certainly closer than anything else I've seen on Android.

Grid view is very nice, downloads decent quality pictures of the Artists to look at while browsing music by Artist. As far as I know, cubed just used one of the Artist's album's artwork for an artist picture.

The now playing screen features nice large artwork, while the automatic donwloading of Artwork is again not great, manually updating to get the best quality artwork for each album leaves you with a very nice, high quality collection of artwork. Unfortunately this took me a couple of hours but it was well worth it.

Seems more customisable than other players, for instance I never browse my music by Album or Genre, so you can just hide these views.

Lockscreen widget works really well.

Cons:

I've had the same problem as I did with cubed after the froyo update. Lags when flicking through your collection. Maybe this is actually a problem with my phone or memory card since it's happened in 2 apps. In the video I posted above there is no lag present. It seems (in both apps) that the artworks needs to be loaded into a local cache or something first as it only lags when you first flick through each artist. Perhaps my memory card is too slow, but I've no idea what's really causing this. Anyway, if the lag issue was fixed in both PlayerPro and Cubed, there is still no way I'd go back to using Cubed. The lag bothers me a lot less in this app than it did in cubed too.

It's €1.99. There are 4-5 highly rated Android music players that are free.

Could do with an mp3 tag editor and equaliser.

Overall:

I'm really liking the app. It looks great. The lag is a problem, but like I said that could just be my phone/memory card. Fix that, throw in a tag editor and equaliser and I'd be hard pushed to have a bad word to say about this app. I would highly recommend it.



Of course I've also used the stock music player, found that a little boring. I also installed DoubleTwist and MixZing for a very short period of time. Can't remember why but I didn't really like either of them, please feel free to add a review for these apps if you've used them a fair bit.

BopNiblets

Had a go of Cubed allright but I went back to the stock Samsung Galaxy one because:
1. Couldn't figure out how to play all songs on shuffle, only albums or artists
2. The lockscreeen control wasn't as good as the stock one (the little slidedown one which is cool)
3. It was a bit laggy

I'd love if the stock one had Last.fm support though.

supaburger

i normally use mixzing
is quite good

newbie2

I use mixzing too. Paid a couple of quid to get the pro version - you can edit tags and it downloads album art for you too. Interface is simple enough. No lag issues or force closures.

flynnduism

I use cubed happily, though I've been impressed with doubletwist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHkqy7jG06g

pawrick

I also use mixzing but occasionally use tunewiki for the extras

Royale with Cheese

newbie2 wrote: »

I use mixzing too. Paid a couple of quid to get the pro version - you can edit tags and it downloads album art for you too. Interface is simple enough. No lag issues or force closures.

What phone/version of Android are you using? I have a Desire with stock 2.2 and I just tried the stock music app for the first time in months. It also lags when scrolling through a menu such as album, where the album covers are part of the menu. When browsing by Artist it's just text and it scrolls fine. So the lag I've found is obviously a problem with the phone/OS and not the apps themselves. Cubed worked perfectly before the 2.2 update (2.2 update also killed support for wma files too, had to redownload about 10-12 albums).

Anybody with a stock 2.2 Desire, could you try scrolling through your music using the albums view of the stock music player? I just want to know if this lag is a general issue or just specific to my phone.

stackeye

Winamp has just been released for Android, I installed it and I have to say I am very impressed so far, although the stock Music Player is just as good, I am going to check out the Wifi-Sync feature later, if it works well then this will be my new player,