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[blgentry]

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.

[syndromeofadown]

I haven't used android for at least a year, but my favorite app for offline listening without a DAC was JetAudio Plus.

I was using "Google Play Music" when my DAC was connected because it was the only app that would send up to 24bit 196kHz. I also noticed it sounded better than others(when using a DAC). It wasn't subtle, it was night and day. When testing all of the audiophile apps I found that none of them sent over 16bit 48kHz to my DAC.  Who knows now though, there may have been an update to my devices that enabled proper DAC support through all apps.
Anyways... Google Play Music is may be worth trying out just for its sound. (Likely there isn't a difference when not using a DAC)

[Whistler Fred]

I've been playing with Google Play Music, mostly because it allows me to play my personal collection on my PC (well, most of it) on my cell phone for use at the office.  A big down-side of Google is the auto-gapping between tracks, at least on the uploaded music.  I've found a work-around to that problem, but it would be so much better if Google would do something about this (the subject has come up on their forum).

I also like Shuttle for music I have stored on my phone.  I've not encountered the problem with missing cover art. 

[blgentry]

I demoed Google Play Music also.  It's ok I guess.  Nothing special and it doesn't seem to show cover art very well.  It seemed to be zoomed in on a small section of the cover and was very low res looking.  The other players that I've liked have proper sized very sharp looking cover art.  All of my cover art is embedded in the files.

Brian.

[Whistler Fred]

Never mind...Google Play just started randomly removing files and refusing to reload them.  Yes, uploading would be nice, but between the auto-gaps and other limitations and frustrations, it's just not worth the bother!

[MusicBringer]

Try this:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/android/apps-games/app-myplayer-lightweight-music-player-t2892233
 

[blgentry]

^ Not a bad player!

It's not exactly what I want, but it really is pretty good and fairly attractive to boot.

I ended up purchasing the paid version of Rocket Music Player and I'm fairly happy with it.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Brian.

[imeric]

I'm using USB Audio Player Pro.  It interacts well and the sound is amazing when used with my Dragonfly Red USB DAC but you'll have pretty much the same impressions about user friendliness compared with the players you tried...

I'm struggling big time to get it to play the songs I want and to properly display album art. So it's definitely not the easiest to use...You can tell the focus is elsewhere (which I kinda like )

If sound is what matters I would go with this one having tried your 1. 2 and 3.

[astromo]

Try this:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/android/apps-games/app-myplayer-lightweight-music-player-t2892233
 

Nice one.

Looks like it may be able to surplant PowerAmp for me. If the changelog is any indicator, it at least benefits from regular and recent development along with good user engagement. Promising.

Thanks for the tip. Initial impression in terms of GUI are positive. Yet to test put to the test of audio playback and BT syncing.