I'm building an Android based music player for portable use. It's nothing elaborate: Just an older device that I want to use as a dedicated music player. No cell phone, no data, just a music player.
I've tried a bunch of players and found a couple I kind of like, but none that really do everything I want. What I want is:
1. Display album art in Albums selection mode. This means big album art, not a tiny thumbnail next to text. This can be an optional feature, as long as it has it.
2. A Play Queue of some sort that I can see and modify.
3. Not slow. This player needs to react pretty much real time to touches.
4. Relatively easy to use. I'll be using this in a car sometimes, so it has to be rapid and easy to understand.
5. Replay gain, or other volume leveling would be nice.
6. Must support playlists.
Here are my impressions of a few of the players I've tried:
1. Neutron: Absolutely horrible. So incredibly hard to use. It's like it was designed by aliens. The whole interface is foreign and strange, including the fact that it continues to scroll after you lift your finger from the screen.
2. Power Amp: Not as hard to use as Neutron, but also a very difficult interface. No grid album art either.
3. Pi Music Player: Very attractive and modern looking. Very simple and mostly immediately intuitive. Album art grid display as I like. It's sort of slow because of the animations between screens. Very, very few options. You can barely customize this player at all.
4. Rocket Player: This is my current pick of the crop. It's fast, it shows an album art grid, has a play queue, and is mostly easy to use. I would like to be able to make the displayed text of songs MUCH bigger. If it could do this, I'd probably just stop looking and choose this one. The paid version has Replay Gain support also.
5. Shuttle Music Player: Similar to Rocket in that it meets most of my base criteria. It has some small display bugs, like the album art will disappear sometimes. It's more attractive than Rocket and I'd probably want to keep using it if it didn't have these bugs.
6. GoneMad Music Player: Similar to Rocket in many ways. Easy to use. Let's me change the font size of displayed text! Also let's me configure up to 6 lines of information with any field I want. Custom text is possible too using %this_field% type expressions. Nice. This is a trial version, but seems fully functional until it times out. The paid version seems to be the same price as Rocket. This is competition.
I've tried probably another half dozen that aren't worth mentioning.
Anyone have any I should try?
Thanks for reading.
Brian.