So, being in possession of a shiny new Samsung Galaxy SII with copious internal memory and a 16gb SD card it was time to add a load of music. To control my music library I wanted to replace the stock music app, which is perfectly functional but dull, with an Android music player with a great interface and sound, solid album artwork support, some advanced tweaking options, a lock screen player that works when using a pattern login, an option to set the library folder so you don't get random audio files turning up, and, ideally, gapless playback.
Straight away I came up against a problem. At random times the SII would pause music playback. Obviously not ideal if it is to be used as my main music player. I thought there must be a background process running somewhere that was upsetting the playback now and then. Guessing that it may be the phone's motion sensors causing the problems, I went to the settings and disabled motion services. No difference. I tried updating the firmware, but I already had the latest version. After some research online it turned out that the culprit was Google Listen. I uninstalled it, found a new podcast app, and all was fine. Why Listen would could such a problem I have no idea.
The next problem I came across was that when viewed in the default music player 75% of the album artwork images were missing. OK, no problem, any player worth its salt should be able to download missing album art, so let's put that on the wish list.
The first app I tried was PowerAmp. It has many great features, such as a powerful graphic equaliser and support for many different file types, but I wasn't that impressed by the interface, which I think is a bit of a mess and confusing. It did try to download the missing album art, but was only partially successful and half of the ones it did download were wrong. You can manually select artwork, but even after doing this in player view many albums stubbornly refused to show the new artwork in album view. Still, it has many audio options to tweak and is generally a very slick app.
PowerAmp screenshots:
Next up was PlayerPro, which has fewer features than PowerAmp, but a better interface. It downloaded and updated nearly all of the missing album artwork, only missing out a couple of very obscure ones. It is also easy to update artwork for an album or artist manually using the app's 'manage artwork' menu. Consequently I had my library updated within minutes with nice big album and artist artwork. It is also able to browse and play videos on your phone, which is a bonus.
PlayerPro was one of those apps that just felt right. After a few minutes of use I was actually listening to music and rediscovering stuff I hadn't listened to in ages. With large album cover art and artist photos, it has the feel of browsing through a CD collection and creating playlists is a breeze.
There were, inevitably, a few niggles with PlayerPro. Sadly, it has no gapless support, but it is in the works apparently. You can restrict the music library to a single folder, but it would be nice to be able to choose multiple folders, as you can with PowerAmp, so you could include download folders from apps like the Amazon MP3 store app. I noticed that the PlayerPro DSP pack ten band graphic equalizer added a tiny amount of background noise, but the default five band one did not. I found it best to have the DSP pack installed, but the equalizer turned off, which gives a clear, balanced sound.
PlayerPro screenshots:
I then moved on to Winamp. It has a nice clean interface and the paid for version promises gapless playback as well as other features like a graphic equalizer. I was surprised to find that gapless playback worked in the free version. It also has wireless syncing with the free desktop client. Altogether a quality app.
Another interesting music player is jukefox. It did an excellent job of downloading album art and also has a gapless playback setting, but, however I tweaked it, there was still a small gap between tracks. Jukefox also has a unique way of browsing music using a zoomable map of cd covers grouped by genres, which is interesting, but ultimately not something you would use very often.
Others I tried included doubleTwist, which has a lovely interface, wireless syncing with the music library on your computer and a video player, although downloading album art is a paid for feature, TTPod, a nice looking player which unfortunately didn't list tracks in album order correctly, preferring to show them alphabetically, Cloudskipper, a lightweight player with social media integration and nice touches like a torch and camera link on the lock screen player, Neutron, which has a horribly fiddly and slow interface, but promises audiophile quality music, although I couldn't make out any obvious audio enhancement, DeaDBeef, a bare bones player, which was interesting but does take minimalism a bit too far, MixZing and RealPlayer both of which worked well, but had nothing to make them stand out from the crowd.
doubleTwist's missing artwork, jukefox's music browser & DeaDBeef's retro look:
There are several Android music players that support gapless playback. However, I found that, although the gap is removed, there is still an audible glitch between tracks. You find yourself thinking 'the music is continuing, but I know the track changes here, wait for the blip.. oh there it is'. It is one area where Android lags behind Apple's products. It occurred to me that the MP3 files themselves could be causing the problem with gapless playback glitches, so I re-encoded using foobar2000 and LAME. With the newly encoded files the glitch problem was lessened, but one app stood out from the rest - GoneMAD, an excellent player with support for many file types as well as perfect, seamless gapless playback.
Many music players, including Winamp and Doubletwist have the concept of a home screen, with icons leading to 'albums', 'artists', 'playlists' etc. I'm not a big fan of this idea. It just means there is more navigation to do to jump between views. In fact, PlayerPro launching straight into album view, with tabbed navigation at the top of the screen and a currently playing strip at the bottom, is probably one of the reasons why it felt instantly user friendly.
After many of the music players had failed to find the missing album art, I installed Album Art Grabber. This went to work straight away and found the vast majority of the missing artwork. A great little app. All the music players now had the correct album covers apart from DoubleTwist, maybe to promote the premium version which features artwork downloading and PowerAmp, which still had problems with several albums.
No matter what software you use, for the purist the SII's audio hardware is not as good as it could be, apparently. However, for a portable player it is sufficiently capable and so many other factors come into play, such as headphones, background noise etc., when out and about that I think this is not a problem.
So, which did I go for? In the end it came down to a select few: PowerAmp, PlayerPro, GoneMAD and Winamp. Well, I was really torn. PowerAmp is the most fully featured, and may even sound slightly better, although I was never totally convinced it actually did. In fact, I found that it's audio features, such as the preamp and equalizer, 'coloured' the music a bit too much for my liking. Sound quality can be so subjective. Winamp was nice and has an active online community. GoneMAD has the best gapless playback, but in reality I don't listen to much music that requires that feature. In the end I decided to go with PlayerPro. I was sold by the great user friendly interface, clean sound and, hopefully, it will soon get updated with gapless playback.
