If Gizmo can't play local files, what's the best media player to use on my phone?
Good question! I've also been looking for a decent music player for either an Android or iOS device that can be used in the car and out and about, after synching the files from MC. Not found one to my satisfaction yet! I don't think my criteria are unreasonable but it's difficult finding something that fits, even more unbelievable when you think that music players are basically how the mobile device started (Walkmans, iPods etc) and should have matured by now.
1. a good usable & attractive UI
2. knows about Album Artist and doesn't group all your albums by contributing artist
3. easy to use queue manipulation
4. shows albums and artists under Genre instead of a track listing
5. sorts albums under artist chronologically not alphabetically
6. easy to operate Playing Now screen
7. handles pre-defined Playlists and allows you to create and save new ones
8. runs on a device that has a decent amount of memory or is expandable (tends to rule out Apple devices!)
The closest I've got so far are, on Android, BubbleuPnP (used as a local player rather than a controller) and Best Music Player, and on iOS LeechTunes. The default Android and iOS music players are terrible.
Gizmo and JRemote would be fantastic as local media players, but therein lies the difficulty of adding to them the synching of not only physical media files but also things like custom views (which is one of MC's major advantages) which need complex indexing and is probably the reason why most media players are so limited in that regard.
If, however, you don't really need custom views and can handle the defaults that mose media players give you, then actually there's quite a lot of free and paid ones around, just have a look in the app store.