As of Jan 3,2011...
If anyone can give information / review about how different apps save downloaded art, it would be very helpful. It seems that art can be embedded in ID3 tags, or it can have put in a folder. But different programs save in different folders or into an "album art" file...which may not be compatible with different programs. Also, how does iTunes, Winamp, and Windows Media handle this? (Ive used each for my music collection, and so may have different types of cover art formats in my collection)
12/28/2010 I didn't mean to start making this into a bigger post. But let me first say what I'm looking at/for:
Features I'm paying attention to:
headset control
Lock Screen and homepage widget
General UI ( and in particular, ease of getting from a "playlist" back to the "Now playing" quickly
Features which are sort of cool to me:
lyric display
Folder / File Organization
Album art (it would help me if someone could tell me about the different types and options here. ID3 mode? Files?
(and a distant fourth in importance) Video player
Equalizer (I don
't care about this but everyone else seems to be)
Features are just can't get myself to care about:
Scrobbing (whatever the hell that is)
Social stuff
Any damn fraking thing that statistically analyzes my preference in order to help me decide what I like. I don't want to robotize my music.
So this is what I have looked at so far:
Samsung Default:
Great Status bar and lock screen controls. headset controls. Has equalizer. NO Folder Select (it scans all music on the phone and so will get unintended stuff into the library). Nothing special other than this, but it a good app. HOWEVER, I'm now using Darky's ROM which does not have the Samsung Lock Screen. The Samsung player's lockscreen widget is tied to the Samsung lockscreen. Also does not have homescreen widget, but this is more than made up for by the very good notification bar integration.
Meridian:
Plays video and music. Headset controls but no lock screen. Good gesture control. Edit ID Tags
Cubed:
Video and Music. NIce Lockscreen widget. Headset controls. Art download in ID3 mode. However I still don't terribly like the interface, but it works. Has a directory filter , so can play just a folder and keep out unwanted songs (like game songs). Downloads art in ID3...method. Don't know if that's good or bad. There really is no "Now Playing" screen. It just shows it super-imposed on the song library. Which is not pretty but its actually functional. For me, Cubed is a good free app.
MixZing:
Plays music and video. Options up the yingyang, including lots of social crap. I'm not going to detail here because lockscreen version is a paid app, and I'm focusing on not paying (it does have trial period though). Good UI. Can do folder view, and has good folder management options. Can switch between folder list and now playing very quickly. Has headset controls. Has Equalizer. Auto-download album art. The free version is staying on my phone because it plays video. Lots of damn social crap.
Winamp:
Just plays Music. Interface easy, but maybe a little dull (maybe there are skinning options?). Has headset controls and lockscreen. Ability to look up info and search on the artist. Ability to syn with Winamp desktop, so a good choice if you use that. Some social crap. No Equalizer
DoubleTwist:
Looks a little like Winamp, but also plays video. Has Lockscreen wideget and headset controls. With $5 purchase can sync with Itunes. No equalizer.
UI is mostly good, if not exciting. Does not do folder view(!). Not that many options. If I wanted to use one player for both music and video, and have the lockscreen widget and handset controls, this definitly works. It also has art download, but that's not so important to me. I also use iTunes Agent to file-sync anyway.
Miui:
Bare basic player. No equalizer. No lockscreen widget. No headset controls. What this does have is a) art download , and most exciting b) lyric read-along. I intend to use this app just for my KTV practice, so it will stay on my phone
(but I recently discovered Lyrics App, which allows me to see Lyrics of everything).
PowerAmp:
This has everything. But the free version is 15 day trialware, and I don't want to go through it all here. One thing I remember about this is that it allows fine customization of its widget appearence.
TinyPlayer:
As the name implies, a small player with minimum bells and wistles. My device is an SGS which generally has an OK time with demanding applications, so this is not for me. But for those who want a simple bare-minimum player, this works.
......
Others have mentioned apps which I need to pay for to try, such as Lithium Player... apps which have a social network focus (Tunewiki), and apps that I need to flash (CW Mod). I'm sorry I cannot add these to this list now.
12/27/2010
I'm in China and sometimes the market is problematic (although I could just fix that with a VPN). When I can download again, I intend to note the features of :
btunes
Astro Player
TuneWiki
Also, I will re-download all the above (I just wiped-flash Darky's awesome ROM for my SGS) and go back over the others and note down features I missed.
Here is a pic of the homescreen widgets.
Widgets (from top to bottom):
Meridian
Cubed
MixZing
Winamp
Doubletwist
I'll never understand why people say they don't understand "cubed" interface. What's confusing about it? It's the same thing as scrolling through albums with a little animation. The new update gives you control over the directory files, so it's not like it's different then any other player. Do people really get that shocked when they see something that looks different but operates the exact same?
Just scroll up or down, man. You'll see the albums or artist (depending on how you choose) in ABC order. You want to skip to a different letter, scroll side to side. That's literally the entire learning curve. Don't like the cube? Change the view mode to Morph Flow. Don't like looking at albums? Change the view mode to boring, it just gives you a list.
The only thing I can possibly imagine people being slow to realize is that to change the place of a song, you click on the dotted light thing at the bottom. To change from artist to album to song you drag the dotted bar in the bottom-middle to the right or left.
This all took me less then 2 minutes to figure out.
poweramp = iTunes . I'm off it. same **** different skin. Cubed can scan all the bands in your library and tell you A) when their upcoming release is and B) the next time their playing a show within 50 miles of you (you can adjust the distance). Now THAT'S practical application.
I appreciate you putting this list together. It is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks.
Hands down the best player is TINY PLAYER. It actually does REAL folder play like you're using windows explorer on your home computer.
Another great feature is the live font size option which lets me read long file names. Even Poweramp doesn't have that crucial feature. What good is it if I can't read what song it is. Especially true for Classical music with long file names.
PS - It is the ugliest ui ever tho lol. But I really don't care.
PS2 - Poweramp doesn't have everything. It lacks sleep timer and font size changing to read long file names. And no true folder play. Both of which are available in tiny player. and it is tiny at 64kb
I figured I would throw a few notes in the discussion about music players since music is a big part of my Android experience. I use two apps, one for playing music located on my phone, and another app for streaming from my home PC.
1) Mixing:
the main reason I bought this app was because of the lock screen abilities. Not only does it give you gesture commands from the lock screen, but it also has a setting that will make the lock screen come active for a few seconds each time a new song starts, showing the album art and song information. I like this a lot since it allows me to see what has just started playing, and mainly because it gives me a few seconds to skip the song if I do not like it ... instead of having to hit the power button first to activate the screen, like all the other music apps do ... it's one less step to distract you when driving. It is a small, nitch feature, but it is worth the money of the full version app for me. I have yet to find another music app that does this.
2) Audiogalaxy:
Hands down, this is the best app to use if you want to stream music from your home computer. This is great for people like me that have huge music libraries that will not fit on an SD card. All you have to do is download the app for your phone, install a small program on your PC, and sign up on their website. It is free, and it simply works with no hastles. I have tried many other apps that I could not get to work ... they all required me to **** around with ports and IP addresses, and I could not get any of them to work. Audiogalaxy was so easy my mom could do it. No screwing around with ports or IP's, just install, setup which folders you want to scan, and then wait for it to build your library. Great app!!
Hopefully Mixzing adds streaming ability into its code so I can just use one music app. Until then I will continue to use these two apps together. Together they make for an awesome music experience on the Android phone.
hi, nice list for reference.
just a quick note from me, i'm using miui and the lockscreen and heatset controls works on cm6 which has those tweaks modded on.
irish22022 said:
I'll never understand why people say they don't understand "cubed" interface. What's confusing about it? ...
Just scroll up or down, man. You'll see the albums or artist (depending on how you choose) in ABC order. ...
...Cubed can scan all the bands in your library and tell you A) when their upcoming release is and B) the next time their playing a show within 50 miles of you (you can adjust the distance). Now THAT'S practical application.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I guess I should say I like "folder view". Or just Song List. I have a lot of songs from independents, songs un-attributed in the tags, songs from Chinese artists, etc. So I don't want to go to an Album or Artist, but rather to a folder. I'm sorry...I did not know the correct terminology.
As for internet-related content, you may have seen I call that stuff "social crap". I have no idea what scrobbing is. The artists don't come to China. And even if I was in the US, I really could not care to share my music tastes with others... let everyone find their own muse.
nghj said:
hi, nice list for reference.
just a quick note from me, i'm using miui and the lockscreen and heatset controls works on cm6 which has those tweaks modded on.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Oh. Sounds cool. I don't want to have to flash something just to get that function though. But having lyrics is fun.
AlexNC75 said:
I figured I would throw a few notes in the discussion about music players since music is a big part of my Android experience. I use two apps, one for playing music located on my phone, and another app for streaming from my home PC.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm just focusing on Apps that I can use outside. But thanks for those comments. Does AudioGalaxy allow non-streaming, regular functionality? FYI some of the other players above (I think Meridian) also have streaming, but I didn't review this because its not something I look for. I need to update for this feature I guess.
I will now download tinyplayer and add this to the review. I also hope to download (from somewhere) the stock Android player.
Right now probably Doubletwist will be my main player, only because its a music and video player that has lockscreen widget and headset controls. OR I will try to reinstall the Galaxy SGS player (which is uninstalled after flashing Darky's ROM). Funny thing is Doubletwist's main sell-point is iPhone integration, and I don't care enough about that to purchase it.
If I was going to spend money (which I may just do), then Mixing is the best of what I have reviewed so far. I don't know if its worth $5 for now.
I personally use 2 music players
1 standard CyanogenMod player
2 Lithium player
I normally do this because I will have music on lithium, and podcast download through methods other than my podcast player in t he CM music player.
since nobody mentioned lithium and it's a pay app I would mention a few things..
Pro: Looks great, UI is great and has nice things like volume built in, multi-colors/customizations and the #1 reason I bought it is it grabs album art for with a few clicks!
Cons: The ui for FF/RW skips to big of a segment in a 2 hour, or 2 hour podcast (not a big deal, it's a music player not a podcast player) and one semi-major issue for me is the program NEVER shows up in tasks (holding home), or previously used programs (etc). For some reason android doesn't recognize it as a program and the CM lockscreen music controls don't work for it.
To me the pro's outweigh the cons so I purchased it even if just for the album grabber.
I still really like bTunes.
I know it's abandonware, but it's only $1.49.
Looks like the iPod player (may be a good thing or a bad thing), it's very simple to use, it has a nice widget and even though it hasn't been updated in some time, it works great on froyo and never crashes on my phone. I don't think it has an equalizer.
TuneWiki is my fave, actually one of my fave Android apps.
Music Player Pro is still the best for me, I wish PowerAmp gets some of MPP features to use only one.
Thanks for the comments about the apps you tested
Tinyplayer for me on the Inc. Half the players can't find the built in memory. Most of the others can't restrict themselves to a folder so a bunch of sound files that aren't music and belong to games.
dvdivx said:
Tinyplayer for me on the Inc. Half the players can't find the built in memory. Most of the others can't restrict themselves to a folder so a bunch of sound files that aren't music and belong to games.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm looking at Mort Player now and it also does folder selection but has a lot more options, (headset control for one)
I'm still using the basic player ...
I've tried some of the more robust apps, but damn if they don't chew up a bunch of runtime memory, causing lag. I'd like an equalizer, but I don't want all the extra garbage that comes with an app, when I don't need it.
Have gone through various music players but Power Amp is the best it's worth paying for in the market.
Rockbox is absolutely the best choice. Equalizer, actual playlist support, themes, lockscreen controls, and plays every codec at the highest quality you throw at it. Just missing widgets, but it's a little buggy at the moment and it's still early in development.
i think u forgot TTPOD
A nice feature is if it is compatible with Last.FM scrobble apps
Nice summary atm i use Winamp becausr it has a esay ui and i love the shoutcast Radio Feature but maybe i switch to Double Twist because of the wifi sync i dont know yet...
Lollipop_Lawlipop said:
Rockbox is absolutely the best choice. Equalizer, actual playlist support, themes, lockscreen controls, and plays every codec at the highest quality you throw at it. Just missing widgets, but it's a little buggy at the moment and it's still early in development.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I will check it out. Widgets is a must-have for me, unless it also has a status bar control option (which is even better than widgets.
jonny68 said:
Have gone through various music players but Power Amp is the best it's worth paying for in the market.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I tend to agree, but I'm not sure how much money I want to spend on my phone. Part of me wants to get an iPhone and never have to fudge around with settings and roms again. Part of me hates the iPhone because I can't do with it what I want. So I'm trying not to invest more money in my phone unless I get something really really must-have. As the default player with the SGS is good (and now can use it with Darky's ROM), I'm good.
phoezies said:
i think u forgot TTPOD
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Will check it out and update.
Zalastax said:
A nice feature is if it is compatible with Last.FM scrobble apps
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm in China and so have missed the social network craze. I think if I was in USA, I still would have missed it.
Poapfel said:
Nice summary atm i use Winamp becausr it has a esay ui and i love the shoutcast Radio Feature but maybe i switch to Double Twist because of the wifi sync i dont know yet...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Winamp's UI is easy, but Double Twist is very similar UI IMO.
Hi,
For some reason my music only shows up for a short period of time after I import it. Using double twist I dropped about 10 albums onto my phone. At first they show up in whatever music player I'm using (winamp,mixzin), but after few minutes they disappear. At that point the newly imported albums only show up in double twist on the phone. In addition the cover art doesn't show up. Even after I get the cover art using cover art grabber or other apps, they don't
stay. This is quite frustrating. I am a recent android from iphone convert. I really want to give the nexus s a chance, but if this and a few other things are indicative of the android experience I'm not sure if i'll be able to stick with it. I'm open and willing to try working with the nexus s, but, certain things are irritating to deal with. Thanks for any and all help.
Colekg said:
Hi,
For some reason my music only shows up for a short period of time after I import it. Using double twist I dropped about 10 albums onto my phone. At first they show up in whatever music player I'm using (winamp,mixzin), but after few minutes they disappear. At that point the newly imported albums only show up in double twist on the phone. In addition the cover art doesn't show up. Even after I get the cover art using cover art grabber or other apps, they don't
stay. This is quite frustrating. I am a recent android from iphone convert. I really want to give the nexus s a chance, but if this and a few other things are indicative of the android experience I'm not sure if i'll be able to stick with it. I'm open and willing to try working with the nexus s, but, certain things are irritating to deal with. Thanks for any and all help.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Is it possible that DoubleTwist did something to prevent other players from seeing your music?
I know it's a stretch/long-shot, but use a file browser to go into your music folders (starting with the very top level one) and see if any of them have a hidden file named .nomedia in them. If they do, they're telling Android media scanner not to index the files in that folder. Maybe deleting them would cure your issue.
I don't use DoubleTwist, and I have no issues with any of the four or five media player apps I have seeing all my music.
I really don't listen to music on my phone very much. I have a desk job and keep Pandora streaming while at work. On my ~hour commute to and from work, I listen to audio books (it's the only time I get to "read"). But, I do enjoy music and have over 200GB of MP3s. Occasionally, I do want to listen to some of my music using my phone, such as when doing yard work or between audio books. Service around here is spotty, so streaming is typically out of the question.
I use Ubuntu on my PC. My phone is a Captivate. (As soon as I can cut off from AT&T, I'm upgrading!) It's been running SlimICS for a while, but I'm getting ready to upgrade to SlimBean.
I've tried a lot of different programs on the PC, and a lot of different apps and haven't found anything that fits my use. This is what I want:
What I want from the Android App:
- Designate a particular folder as the source for music. This is the big one for me. I don't want it catching my audio books (I have a dedicated audio book player that I love, but it's not suited for music), audio recordings, and other sound files. All but two apps I've tried didn't have that capability and one of those didn't seem to really work right. Why is that so rare of a feature?
- Use ID3 tags, including album art. But that's fairly common.
- Easy navigation. By artist, album, song titles, etc. Don't rely on "playlists." I don't build them. Just show me all my music and let me easily chose if I want to play a particular album, everything by a particular artist, a particular genre, everything all mixed up together, etc.
- Lock screen controls.
My favorite music app so far is 3 (Cubed). But, specifying a music directory doesn't work. It has a menu option to only look in a folder your specify, and I've enabled that, but it's still seeing my audio books and other sound files. It has lock screen controls but I don't like the way it changes the lock screen. And it has a beautiful interface interrupted by these ugly "pop up" boxes. I love using parts of it, but find other parts hard to use.
What I want from a Ubuntu program:
I'm currently using RhythmBox, and it's OK. It serves most of my needs except the big one. How it syncs to my phone. I have a LOT of music and I hate building playlists. I also hate trying to manually go through the thousands and thousands of songs trying to pick out which ones I want to copy to the phone. I just don't have that kind of time. What I want it to do is just randomly pick songs until a threshold that I set has been met. For instance, copy 5 GB of random songs from my entire collection to my phone. Or, copy 3 hours of random songs from the Metal genre. Or perhaps I'm in a Dylan kind of mood so I want it to copy 3 hours of random Bob Dylan songs. And if there's something specific I want to put on the phone, I can do that manually.
So, am I overlooking something that will give me these options? Is there something out there for me?
ubuntu: moc
android: poweramp
I am pleased with both.
Sent from my SGH-I777 using xda premium
I haven't looked at PowerAmp because, well... it's not free. Free isn't a requirement, but I just don't feel like I listen to music on my phone enough to justify paying for an app like that.
Now, about moc... I had not heard of that before. I googled it and read about it, but I don't see any way to do what I'm wanting to do.
yeah, its different than what you want. The complete opposite, actually. But I still recommend it -- it grows on you. Worth an apt-get.
Sent from my SGH-I777 using xda premium
I haven't tried it yet, but this program looks promising: http://mr-random.sourceforge.net/docs.html#Doc/
Give PowerAmp a try, they have the trial version. Once you've tried it, it's hard to use any other.
Music
HeathicusF said:
I really don't listen to music on my phone very much. I have a desk job and keep Pandora streaming while at work. On my ~hour commute to and from work, I listen to audio books (it's the only time I get to "read"). But, I do enjoy music and have over 200GB of MP3s. Occasionally, I do want to listen to some of my music using my phone, such as when doing yard work or between audio books. Service around here is spotty, so streaming is typically out of the question.
I use Ubuntu on my PC. My phone is a Captivate. (As soon as I can cut off from AT&T, I'm upgrading!) It's been running SlimICS for a while, but I'm getting ready to upgrade to SlimBean.
I've tried a lot of different programs on the PC, and a lot of different apps and haven't found anything that fits my use. This is what I want:
What I want from the Android App:
- Designate a particular folder as the source for music. This is the big one for me. I don't want it catching my audio books (I have a dedicated audio book player that I love, but it's not suited for music), audio recordings, and other sound files. All but two apps I've tried didn't have that capability and one of those didn't seem to really work right. Why is that so rare of a feature?
- Use ID3 tags, including album art. But that's fairly common.
- Easy navigation. By artist, album, song titles, etc. Don't rely on "playlists." I don't build them. Just show me all my music and let me easily chose if I want to play a particular album, everything by a particular artist, a particular genre, everything all mixed up together, etc.
- Lock screen controls.
My favorite music app so far is 3 (Cubed). But, specifying a music directory doesn't work. It has a menu option to only look in a folder your specify, and I've enabled that, but it's still seeing my audio books and other sound files. It has lock screen controls but I don't like the way it changes the lock screen. And it has a beautiful interface interrupted by these ugly "pop up" boxes. I love using parts of it, but find other parts hard to use.
What I want from a Ubuntu program:
I'm currently using RhythmBox, and it's OK. It serves most of my needs except the big one. How it syncs to my phone. I have a LOT of music and I hate building playlists. I also hate trying to manually go through the thousands and thousands of songs trying to pick out which ones I want to copy to the phone. I just don't have that kind of time. What I want it to do is just randomly pick songs until a threshold that I set has been met. For instance, copy 5 GB of random songs from my entire collection to my phone. Or, copy 3 hours of random songs from the Metal genre. Or perhaps I'm in a Dylan kind of mood so I want it to copy 3 hours of random Bob Dylan songs. And if there's something specific I want to put on the phone, I can do that manually.
So, am I overlooking something that will give me these options? Is there something out there for me?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The best suggestion I can give you is not a PC application, but is rather a piece of hardware. I would recommend getting a Pogoplug and an external HDD. Connect the Pogoplug to the HDD and then connect the Pogoplug to the internet via cat5/6, then create an account and download the app on your phone.. in this scenario, the only limit to what you want to store and how much space you have is the capacity of your external HDD; This device can support multiple HDD's, so its pretty much limitless.
^^1(2050]=7 1337 said:
The best suggestion I can give you is not a PC application, but is rather a piece of hardware. I would recommend getting a Pogoplug and an external HDD. Connect the Pogoplug to the HDD and then connect the Pogoplug to the internet via cat5/6, then create an account and download the app on your phone.. in this scenario, the only limit to what you want to store and how much space you have is the capacity of your external HDD; This device can support multiple HDD's, so its pretty much limitless.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I appreciate the suggestion, and it looks like a nice product, but I fail to see how that accomplishes my goal.
I was recently looking at app sizes and the photo, video, and music apps take up a LOT of space! And I noticed when compared to other music, video, and photo apps they don't do much else.
I also noticed that when I downloaded Memorylage, PhotofastViewer, and a couple others, I can't make some of them my default apps.
I want to delete the Photo, Video player, and Music apps. Is there any negative consiquenises to doing this? I have other apps to replaced them installed, but I want them to take on default status. How do I do that?
Thank you,
lgnationrc
EDIT: When I say a LOT of space, that is compared to the replacements I found...
"Uninstalling" the apps is fine and easy. Deleting them entirely from the drive is trickier and is unsupported, but has been reported to work.
I posted this thread as a bug because that's what I consider it.
IMO, a *media* player should not list in its directory/database those files most people would reasonably categorize as not truly listenable media, such as the ones in folders from this post's subject line. That or there should be a setting where I can tell the player to ignore specific folders when scanning for media.
If I play all songs on shuffle, I don't want to to be humming along with tunes only to be surprised by a sound effect. And I don't want to have to bother filtering out those sounds when creating a playlist.
Even putting a .nomusic or .nomedia file in these folders does nothing to stop the files' listing. I consider this a major flaw in Google Play Music, and now in Encore, too. Or maybe it's Lollipop, because I thought the "dot" files took care of it in earlier OS versions. Even so, if the OS is coded incorrectly, the media player should provide a workaround if possible.
I like the concept of Encore, but there must be a way to deal with this easily, cleanly, and at one time. I have a *lot* of custom sounds -- some effects, some snippets of "real" songs -- I assign to various events and to many different contacts, so this is a big deal for me.
The solution was to delete Media Storage data from Apps to get it going. Unfortunately, this also clears all associations with different forms of media, but I judged it a worthy consequence for initial use. I also have a ".nomusic" (not ".nomedia") file in the folders I want excluded. However, we'll have to see what happens when I update my SD card with new album releases that come out tomorrow.