Music player for Android (Not Streaming)

[Vernon Barnes]

What are people using Android devices using to play music?

I am probably going to have to replace my phone soon and don't really want to pay a premium for an iPhone if I can get similar functionality to iTunes which has served me well enough to date. I want to load music, playlists etc. onto my phone over a USB cable, easily find albums and tracks  and play them on the phone with no internet connection.

As far as I can see using Google Music Manager has a 50,000 limit, which will not be an issue, but it appears it loads from the PC to the cloud and then you download to the phone, which I imagine will take hours.  Also it seems to insist on taking card numbers and seems quite insistent in trying to persuade you to  sign up for their streaming services. I assume Google has reasonable facilities for creating playlists, organizing tracks and understands the concept of an album.

Apple Music for Android also seems to be intent on you streaming as far as I can see. I may be wrong but from what I have read USB connection to iTunes is only available on iPhones. Does this mean transfer via the Cloud?

There seem to be several music player apps, Poweramp https://powerampapp.com/ looks reasonable and has the big advantage of being able to play many formats including FLAC.  I am not clear how the transfer is managed and I assume synchronization with the library on the PC is manual??

Any comments welcome.

 

 

[paulo]

I use VLC, does what I need it to, but I'm by no means a power user. Basically as long as it plays I don't really care exactly what is playing it.

[Vernon Barnes]

13 minutes ago, paulo said:

I use VLC, does what I need it to, but I'm by no means a power user. Basically as long as it plays I don't really care exactly what is playing it.

Thanks, I use VLC as a media player on one of my computers so I will add that to the short list.

[msmcleod]

1 hour ago, paulo said:

I use VLC, does what I need it to, but I'm by no means a power user. Basically as long as it plays I don't really care exactly what is playing it.

Yeah, I use VLC on all my machines - Mac, Windows & Linux. It just works for the vast majority of stuff.

[arlen2133]

Hey Gly,

I have an Android phone (Samsung S9) and I use their media player.  You can set up playlists along with using MP3s that contain pictures and the likes. 

Fairly easy to set up and you can upload your music via USB C directly (no cloud needed). 

Just a thought...

[S.L.I.P.]

My favorite music player app is Pulsar Music Player - Mp3 Player, Audio Player.  When you click on shuffle, most music apps use an algorithm where some songs play a lot, and some songs very rarely or ever play.  When you click shuffle with Pulsar it will take all the songs you have on your device, and create a random playlist, so every song will get played.  I have a couple of thousand songs on my phone, and once it plays all the songs through, I just click shuffle, and it creates a totally new order.  There is a free version, and a paid version. The paid version adds an equalizer. Other than that they are the same.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rhmsoft.pulsar&hl=en_US

[craigb]

Now I just need a newer phone with more memory!

[Vernon Barnes]

Thanks for the replies and suggestions.

I am considering a Samsung Galaxy A50 which has 128GB.  If I go this route I will try the standard player as suggested by arlen2133 first and move on to something else in the event I don't like it for some reason.

[Tenfoot]

I have been using Android devices for years. My audio player of choice is JetAudio+ with the AM3D Audio Enhacer plugin. Costs around 10 bucks all up. Worth every cent!

[Mesh]

18 hours ago, Glyn Barnes said:

 

There seem to be several music player apps, Poweramp https://powerampapp.com/ looks reasonable and has the big advantage of being able to play many formats including FLAC.  I am not clear how the transfer is managed and I assume synchronization with the library on the PC is manual??

Any comments welcome.

 

 

I've been using the full version Poweramp for about 8 years now and I really like it. One time purchase (IIRC under $5) and it sounds very good.

[dcumpian]

Glyn,

 

If you just need a player, there are several. The difficulty comes if you are trying to replicate iTunes Smart Playlist functionality. As far as I am aware, there are no Android players that do this, though you can fake it if you manually copy songs in a smart playlist from iTunes onto the phone. Unfortunately, you won't be able to sync back play counts and ratings which could break some of your smart playlist if that data is important.

Musicbee supports smart playlists and I believe they have a utility to allows for syncing data back to the music library from an Android device. Foobar2000 also supports Smart Playlists, but as far as I know only syncs one-way.

Good luck on your search!

Dan