Why is it so hard to find a decent music player? - Captivate General

It's things like this that makes me frustrated about Android. There is so much noise about hotspot, or tethering, or other geeky stuff that are pretty useless for regular users. But the music player, a standard feature for every phone nowadays, is really bad.
All I want is to transfer the damn songs with playlist and play on my phone!
Well, the stock player doesn't recognize playlist.
So I have to use other music apps.
I have tried doubleTwist. It doesn't recognize playlist created by its own desktop app. And also, you have to use its desktop app to sync music. And the syncing is not so good, lots of Artwork is missing.
I then turn to Cubed (superscript 3). It's cool. It reads my playlist. But it creates duplicated ones. In other words, every time you sync your music, it creates new playlist. I did a little research, it turns out it's the problem of the OS. If you copy your songs to external SD, the OS will scan them and then create duplicated list. Music players just read the list from the OS.
Another problem of Cubed is, if I manually copy music to SD card, all my artworks are gone.
I have tried other *free* music players on the market. None of them works perfectly. And I am so cheap that I don't want to pay for a feature that a smartphone should easily have.

mwxiao said:
It's things like this that makes me frustrated about Android. There is so much noise about hotspot, or tethering, or other geeky stuff that are pretty useless for regular users. But the music player, a standard feature for every phone nowadays, is really bad.
All I want is to transfer the damn songs with playlist and play on my phone!
Well, the stock player doesn't recognize playlist.
So I have to use other music apps.
I have tried doubleTwist. It doesn't recognize playlist created by its own desktop app. And also, you have to use its desktop app to sync music. And the syncing is not so good, lots of Artwork is missing.
I then turn to Cubed (superscript 3). It's cool. It reads my playlist. But it creates duplicated ones. In other words, every time you sync your music, it creates new playlist. I did a little research, it turns out it's the problem of the OS. If you copy your songs to external SD, the OS will scan them and then create duplicated list. Music players just read the list from the OS.
Another problem of Cubed is, if I manually copy music to SD card, all my artworks are gone.
I have tried other *free* music players on the market. None of them works perfectly. And I am so cheap that I don't want to pay for a feature that a smartphone should easily have.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Are you coming from an iTunes? Many of the problems with artwork deal with the way the artwork is embedded. AAC files do tags poorly and I had to rerip all my files to MP3 and make sure that the artwork was embedded in the tags and not in a folder. I used MediaMonkey to sync my music to my phone. I don't use playlists - I just put about 2GB of music on and pick what i want. The stock music player works great for me in this regard.
The stock music player allows local playlists, but so far doesn't import them. I think it is a matter of discovering name and format.

alphadog00 said:
Are you coming from an iTunes? Many of the problems with artwork deal with the way the artwork is embedded. AAC files do tags poorly and I had to rerip all my files to MP3 and make sure that the artwork was embedded in the tags and not in a folder. I used MediaMonkey to sync my music to my phone. I don't use playlists - I just put about 2GB of music on and pick what i want. The stock music player works great for me in this regard.
The stock music player allows local playlists, but so far doesn't import them. I think it is a matter of discovering name and format.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for your reply. I have a relatively big library in iTunes so playlist is kinda of necessary for me. It really sucks that the stock music player can't do it.
I didn't know about the iTunes artworks problem. All my song files are .mp3. I thought artwork was embedded in the file.

I've had pretty good success using an app called "isynchr" available in the market. It's not free, though! But it allows you to take your playlists from iTunes, copy them (and the songs) over to your phone and play everything using the music player that came on the phone.

Try this:
hxxp://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=751429
It works great for me and along with the mp3tagger pro app that lets you edit the ID3 tags and download artwork, its been a huge timesaver for me.

I feel your pain; I've had trouble finding a music player I really liked too. As of now, I'm just using the stock Samsung Music Player.
...which actually isn't that bad. It works well enough and the 5.1 feature is awesome.

check doubletwist. very good GUI and has itunes compatibility but I have not used that personally

DoubleTwist is a good music player and can export your playlists from itunes. They syncing is a bit slow tho.

I really had a hard time with doubletwist, and it took forever to start up on the pc.
I would recommend 'Songbird' on the desktop. It's built on top of a Mozilla Firefox framework, has great plug-ins and extensions, and via MTP can sync playlists with M3Us to the captivate, and then mixzing as the player on the captivate.

noidd said:
Try this:
hxxp://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=751429
It works great for me and along with the mp3tagger pro app that lets you edit the ID3 tags and download artwork, its been a huge timesaver for me.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks a lot. The Android music player is much better than the Samsung one. Though I have a few bugs for just 10 min of try. Well, it's actually not a big of a deal. Playlist works fine, album art works fine. And that's all I am asking for.

closeshave2 said:
I've had pretty good success using an app called "isynchr" available in the market. It's not free, though! But it allows you to take your playlists from iTunes, copy them (and the songs) over to your phone and play everything using the music player that came on the phone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
+1 on this app, you can use the stock samsung player, and double twist recongizes the playlists as well. it was much easier and faster on my computer as well. syching around 6 gigs of music only took around 15 mintues as opposed to over 2 hours with double twist.

ANOTHER good and easy to use apps is called "itunes agent". All you have to do is plug in the phone as USB drive and use it to sync you songs. Check it out. I use it for my WinMo phone and it is probably one of the best tool for sync songs to my phne.

mwxiao said:
Thanks for your reply. I have a relatively big library in iTunes so playlist is kinda of necessary for me. It really sucks that the stock music player can't do it.
I didn't know about the iTunes artworks problem. All my song files are .mp3. I thought artwork was embedded in the file.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I had all my music in iTunes (many files were AAC - ripped that way before i knew better) and I learned the hardway that iTunes some funky things. I actually used MP3tag to fix the tags - lots of Android phones don't like the tags if some fields are empty - this has the effect of showing uknown artist and maybe empty album art. iTunes added some funky stuff to some of the tags, so once i got it all cleaned up and made sure the album artwork was embedded in the tags all was good.
As for playlists - you could try Samsung Kies - it does sync with the phone and allows you to make playlists. I have not tried it for syncing yet.

Related

Transferring Music to TP

Is there ANY other program you can use to sync songs to a TP besides WMP? I've been using WMP, but it keeps on making random duplicates of all my songs, and it's REALLY annoying.
I would greatly appreciate any advice.
Oh and I don't want to just drag+drop, I would like some sort of program.
Thanks.
i agree i moved from a iphone and i got to say its annoying, the way windows mobile phones organize music, and when i use windows media player mobile to update my library it seaches the entire device and grabs even system sounds.
Hmm, I just put my microsd card into my computer and dump all the music I want to listen to (mp3, flak, ogg, what ever) into the music folder to play with the built in player / core player.
Eric03 said:
Is there ANY other program you can use to sync songs to a TP besides WMP? I've been using WMP, but it keeps on making random duplicates of all my songs, and it's REALLY annoying.
I would greatly appreciate any advice.
Oh and I don't want to just drag+drop, I would like some sort of program.
Thanks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
How is drag and drop ANY more difficult than a program?
dr g said:
How is drag and drop ANY more difficult than a program?
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Click to collapse
Well at least with WMP I can see my music in a "library" setup, as opposed to just opening my music folder which has thousands upon thousands of subfolders. It's just much easier for me (at least the way my music folder is setup) to use a program such as WMP.... but WMP sucks. That is why I am asking for an alternative to WMP.
10332007 said:
Hmm, I just put my microsd card into my computer and dump all the music I want to listen to (mp3, flak, ogg, what ever) into the music folder to play with the built in player / core player.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thats exactly what I do and it works like a charm. It is easier than using a program in my opinion. Are you doing something wrong? is it giving you trouble moving the files to the microSD card?
When I start Winamp and have my phone plugged in, it detects it and asks if I want to use it to manage my music on the phone. Winamp has a great name out there, maybe it oculd be useful.
I also used Yahoo Music Engine at once point and that worked great, like itunes. I think that whole deal is still around too, albeit Yahoo music has changed a bit, the app was called Yahoo Music Engine.
I have not tried sync with WM11. There must be a simple option or something you are missing. Perhaps it has to do with Media Player on WM6 and the library function. If you scan the device and organize the library to ignore your Windows folder then it probably won't be a problem on the WM11 side.
Does that make any sense?
WM11 is simple drag and drop; the problem is that when it loads music onto your Phone/SD card it puts it into the file structure Artist/Album/Track based off id3 tags. So if your music is improperly tagged or if you have more than one copy of a song like an album and a compilation album you'll end up with duplicates.
Personally I just wipe out the Music folder on my SD card every 2 weeks or so and dump a new playlist onto it. You can use the WMP sort function in the playlist to eliminate any duplicates before you copy them over. You can still add to the card later and it won't reinstall the same file so long as it's not a duplicate on your desktop like I mentioned above.
As for getting rid of ringtones showing up in your library on your phone I use Pocket Player for my MP3 player and it has an "Exclude Directory" option on it so it will only update from the SD card music folder.
Did Wm4 or CE or whatever handle music?
So that whole development time while WM5 was on market and ipod appeared, was MS just sitting there saying, "Well these are business devices let's focus on getting four Excel cells to show up on this ****tay 320x240 screen instead"
Great.
And the even funier part is the new Blackberry virtualization occurring over WM6. If they were so good at business apps then why is this occurring, HELP ME UNDERSTAND hahahhaha
This was all tongue in cheek utterance from a bewildered fan of MS and their spastic roll outs!!!!!

Music and Android?

I think this is the one area Apple beats Android, you connect your iPhone it syncs no hassle, On android its all a bit of a nightmare.
I've tried Double Twist but the damn thing is painfully slow to sync, can't edit duplicates and whatever else, it looks good but thats about it.
Winamp looked good on the surface, I made my playlist went to sync it took forever, then when I added more songs to a particular playlist and went to sync again rather than adding to the original playlist on the phone it created another playlist, so you actually have 2 playlist of the same playlist old and new.
So basically I need a way to sync and a player on the phone. I appreciate you can just dump all your tracks on the music folder but its impossible to organise 1000+ MP3's this way, so they would need organised prior to going onto the phone.
Any advice?
Nothing easier than put the mp3's in the media folder. Why do you think, syncing with ITunes is easier. I hate that software.
I'm organising my mp3 with mp3tag!
em.20 said:
Nothing easier than put the mp3's in the media folder. Why do you think, syncing with ITunes is easier. I hate that software.
I'm organising my mp3 with mp3tag!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Lol same here, mp3tag owns.
Winamp works fine for me; no duplicate playlists. Maybe give that another shot? I love winamp on the PC though, so my perception may be skewed a bit by fanboyism. You could try the Google Music Beta as well. I thought I wouldn't like it, but having my entire 200 GB music library streamable is pretty handy. Personally, I prefer to manually sort and tag my tracks on my PC.
Combo Winamp + mp3tag.
But i do'nt sync with winamp, putting mp3 on the folders is much faster...
i've been using google's music beta service to stream music to me laptop/phone. works great. only issue is the new music app has no controls in the notification center or lockscreen.
slugger09 said:
its impossible to organise 1000+ MP3's this way
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Click to collapse
I don't understand. Your music app will automatically find your mp3's and categorize them for you. Just put your MP3's anywhere on your SD card and you're done.
Make music folder, drag and drop
I hated how ipods have to sync, like if I go to my friends house want want some songs then delete my songs then put all of his songs grrr iTunes...
Sent from my Nexus S 4G using XDA App
drag and drop to SD card. never used 3rd party... seems silly.
em.20 said:
Nothing easier than put the mp3's in the media folder. Why do you think, syncing with ITunes is easier. I hate that software.
I'm organising my mp3 with mp3tag!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Unfortunately and I can't speak about mp3tag, but dragging and dropping at least doesn't compress the audio file to save space at no reduction of quality. Itunes does this, and Itunes really isn't all that hard to use either.
Audio from Apple devices are better quality most times, but multimedia is one of Apple's strong parts.(Although also a lot of times you won't notice a difference) The original music app for Android is okay for just music, HTC's is okay, Miui is pretty nice, and the new music app from Google is pretty nice too. The audio support for Android is getting better.
I originally used doubletwist but it kept doubling, trippling, and even quadrupled the number of times a song was in my library. Finally went to ISYNCR &isyncrwifi. Works great, fast.
Sent from my SCH-I800 using XDA Premium App
rumblee1 said:
I originally used doubletwist but it kept doubling, trippling, and even quadrupled the number of times a song was in my library. Finally went to ISYNCR &isyncrwifi. Works great, fast.
Sent from my SCH-I800 using XDA Premium App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It did that to me as well and that's the problem with most of these syncing solutions, there is no common sense.
And as for putting all on 1 folder in the SD card, Now say I want song 3 from album A on a playlist followed by song 6 from Album E and so on there is no easy way of organizing this on the phone which is why I like it done on the PC, I have various genres of music, I don't want a hardcore trance song followed by country.
Google music doesn't work in the UK either
Great post and some really useful tips there. I love resource lists like this. Have social bookmarked it in the hope that others can also benefit.
thanks for the tips
I also do drag and drop, but yes apple is smoother in this area.
slugger09 said:
It did that to me as well and that's the problem with most of these syncing solutions, there is no common sense.
And as for putting all on 1 folder in the SD card, Now say I want song 3 from album A on a playlist followed by song 6 from Album E and so on there is no easy way of organizing this on the phone which is why I like it done on the PC, I have various genres of music, I don't want a hardcore trance song followed by country.
Google music doesn't work in the UK either
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What you are describing here is what I do on "PowerAmp". I have folders (has option for folders or library), then if I want I use the built in "Que" to select songs from different folders. You can also edit tags in PowerAmp.
Wow. And here I thought I was the only one who uses mp3tag.
mp3tag , is a great
+ 1 mp3 tag
Sent from my GT-i9100 with MIUI 1.7.8 - xda premium app
Gorship said:
drag and drop to SD card. never used 3rd party... seems silly.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i use meridian only to play mp3 for a single directory

Best way to manage music?

Anyone know a good way to manage music with a g2x??
I have well over 2k songs on my itunes. I have them all on my g2x, but it seems to have a poor music managing system.
Songs/Artists/Playlists are duplicated many times, playlists duplicate the songs within them sometimes, etc.
I'm wondering if theres a good software to manage the music on my phone?
Something comparable to itunes preferrably
I just want to be able to make playlists on my computer without them duplicating on my phone.
I've tried doubletwist, itunesagent (which doesn't copy playlists), and even winamp.
i'm just using Google Play
I'm just using Google Play Music as well and transfer my files via mass storage. Now I use the cloud for Google Play Music and just keep a few albums on my SD card. I have no problems with duplicates or any other issues.
You have to get a tag editor and
Make sure there filled out right... iTunes fixes them but the music players don't.
Sent from my LG G2x using Tapatalk 2
Kplaylist + MediaMonkey + Google Play
All my music is on an a private web server that can stream all my music. I stopped using iTunes a long time ago, but all my music is on this web server.
http://www.kplaylist.net/
If you can setup an Apache Service with PHP, you will love this app. Its the only thing I use and get my music anywhere.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
MediaMonkey
http://www.mediamonkey.com/
I only use this to update the ID Tags of all my songs and add the album picture from the web. Its a bit tricky, but what I do is, when I decide I want to add and album to Google Play I tag and add the picture album then upload them.
I have like 40 gigs of music, and slowly have converted to Google play. I fix the tags and albums as I go. Its worked so far
Sometimes the picture or the album name comes out wrong, have to re-upload or manually correct it once its inside Google. It happens sometimes, especially if mediamonkey can't find the rare song online.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Google Play
If done right, all the songs will be properly tagged and the album picture inside. Its running better now then when it was called (Google Music). Used to crash alot. The only decision you have is "Make available Offline"
In the end, when its nicely organized, I use Google Play way way more.
yoo992 said:
I've tried doubletwist, itunesagent (which doesn't copy playlists), and even winamp.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've been using Doubletwist and it copies my playlist from itunes just fine
I use Banshee Media Player. I have it set up to sync one specific playlist. It works in one-click and it even converts my FLAC files on the fly to V9 mp3! Even better, even though I have it set to sync one playlist, it keeps track of which tracks belong to other playlists too. I use it on Ubuntu but I think the sync options work on Windows too.
Edit: It also keeps my media tagged, downloads album art and sorts the files into an [Artist]>[Album] folder structure.

Music Organisation

Is there a way to transfer music from my PC/iTunes without losing all of the information such as album artwork and artist name? Just, when I transfer an album over at the moment, it puts some songs as individual albums instead of with the album their with. For example, I transferred over Some Nights by Fun (great album) and, whilst most of the tracks were fine, Carry On was listed under a separate album. Anyway to avoid this?
Any ideas?
Music Folder Player
Google Play: Music Folder Player
"If you regularly play music on your mobile Android device, then Music Folder Player may come in handy.
It can be annoying when playing ,music without tags for example of your ripped CD’s without downloading the ID3 tag. How about when you’ve added music in a ‘new music folder in your memory card without knowing exactly all the artists/albums? Well, the dev of the app, XDA forum member cyberniko says this is where his app can help.
Music Folder Player is available as a free version in the Market, and the dev is looking for feedback on tablets."
http://www.xda-developers.com/android/music-player-with-filefolder-browsing/
My friend ,
I'll try to explain what i've done with my mp3 library
It's all about the tag stored in the mp3 file itself
There's more than a version of this tag
One file can contain more than one version
That's make the conflict
I'm using a wonderful free software on my pc called mp3tag
There's nothing you can't do in the tag
Give it a try
Sent from my GT-N7000 using Tapatalk 2
Maybe you could give Mediamonkey a try instead of itunes... It also allows syncing with Note.
www.mediamonkey.com
Ps. Not affiliated with this vendor, just sick of the bloated itunes and found a nice alternative.
Sent from my GT-N7000 using xda app-developers app
Brad387 said:
Is there a way to transfer music from my PC/iTunes without losing all of the information such as album artwork and artist name? Just, when I transfer an album over at the moment, it puts some songs as individual albums instead of with the album their with. For example, I transferred over Some Nights by Fun (great album) and, whilst most of the tracks were fine, Carry On was listed under a separate album. Anyway to avoid this?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.vier.music.syncpro
I use this This is the greatest program I've used! I love iTunes for some reason, and this app syncs everything perfectly for me. I'd highly recommend it. It doesn't sync play count or stars, but that's OK. Playlists are all that I need and a fast easy interface.

ISO music player app

I am looking for a music player app. Nothing fancy. I have 1 request that it MUST do.
I have 2 folders on my phone: "Music" and "Audiobooks"
I want the music app to play stuff ONLY found in the "Music" folder. So far every app I have tried cannot be regulated to 1 main folder (in "Music" I have many sub-folders). So when I push shuffle I get audiobooks in there as well. I do not want that.
This will be installed on an unroofed galaxy 5S with up to date software.
I would recommend MortPlayer Music and MortPlayer Audiobook!
I use it myself for many years and I'm satisfied.
Oh common man...you can do that with any music player.....just rename the folder "audiobooks" to ".audiobooks".......ie just put a dot before the folder name..... And all music players will stop scanning files from that folder..... You may need to clear media database first......for that simplest method is settings-apps-all apps-com.android.providers.media-clear data.......then reboot and wait for a while so that all the stuff in our gallery and music player comes back...this time nothing will show up from audiobooks folder.
GoneMAD Music Player. You can select which folders are to be scanned and thus which audio files are shown in the music library.
I believe poweramp has this feature, too.
Honestly, if you want to go deep with it, I would use this modded Sony Walkman app. It is awesome and most, if not all features work depending on device and Android version.
Check it out HERE
gins100 said:
I would recommend MortPlayer Music and MortPlayer Audiobook!
I use it myself for many years and I'm satisfied.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
downloaded Mortplayer. This was exactly what I was looking for (at least so far) thank you.

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