A lot of people, myself included, enjoy listening to music on their mobile devices. Although music streaming has taken off and is extremely popular right now, a lot of people have to deal with low internet data plans that restrict their streaming capabilities. Others have a large selection of offline music readily available and a device that can hold them so offline music players are still very popular. Today we are going to be looking at 5 out of the best ones you can find in Google Play.
Poweramp 15-day trial and Full
If you are looking for an almost desktop-like experience, Poweramp is where it’s at. With this app you will be getting support for loads of different formats, a very good equalizer with tons of settings to play around with and incredible audio processing all around. There’s also gapless playback, crossfading, replay gain correction and mono mixing.
Loads of smaller features that add to the experience too like the app’s ability to download missing artwork and song lyrics, edit tags and more things like home and lock screen widgets. It truly is one of the most fully-featured players you could hope to find. It is also one of the most customizable ones in case you have not noticed with support for themes as well.
This app might be most popular because of its iTunes support but it also offers a host of other features that make it worthwhile. Of course, that utility along with other premium features like album art search are reserved for the paid version but the free one is pretty great as well. In fact, you will only pay for the app if you are looking for great interactions with iOS devices or Magic Radio, the company’s music streaming service.
It is pretty much like Spotify, Pandora and Google All-Access and it can create radio stations based on your likes and even keywords that you insert. There is only a 7-day trial for that and unrestricted access comes at a costly $24.99 per year. It might not be as powerful as other apps in its category but the great interface and intuitive design make it a very good choice.
Google’s very own music app is known for Google All Access, the unrestrictive music streaming service. However, it is also great for offline music playing and it’s even better for people that like the company’s design. There is a great interface here that works incredibly well in most devices, especially newer ones. If you are using cloud syncing for your tracks, there is no other app that works this well and Android users will definitely appreciate that.
There are not a lot of features for offline music here but the basic ones are covered. This is the app to get if you want to listen to both online and offline music and keep everything in one place but this all depends on your love for Google and its streaming services more than anything else.
n7 Player (Trial, full version through in-app purchase of $3.49)
An app that has grown to be a very popular choice among Android users and for good reason. The User Interface (UI) of n7 Player is very innovative and that worked in its favor, unlike what you may think. Once you install the app for the first time, it will automatically take your library and arrange it in a beautiful composition. It will then take you to its home screen and teach you how to use the gesture based interface. It might be a bit awkward at first but it gets very easy after a while and it is always visually pleasant.
The UI is not the only thing that the app excels in though. It has a full 10-band equalizer on Android 4.1 and later, support for many audio file formats, gapless playback and a very good tag editor that can be accessed even when playing a song. The DLNA/UPNP and Chromecast support also mean that you can stream your music to all of your wireless devices in your house like your smart TV and game console.
This app represents the lightweight but powerful category of this post. Shuttle and its pro version, Shuttle+, are both amazing music players with a lot of great and quality features and an incredibly designed user interface. It is definitely my personal favorite of the bunch as I love minimalistic approaches that also provide amazing rewards.
Within Shuttle you will find full gesture support, song queues, a sleep timer, highly customizable widgets including one with lock screen controls, gapless playback, headset button controls, artwork and artist information downloading and a fully customizable interface with themes, including a “Google Now” look alike with a style cards UI. Oh and there is also support for lyrics and a 6-bad equalizer with optional bass boost. With the pro version you will also get folder browsing and tag editing, although Android KitKat 4.4 removed the ability to edit SD files for security purposes.
