Our Review:

Rocket Music Player is a suggestion I got from several people in the comments section a good couple of years ago. It is still my first choice for this category, and it keeps getting better. In fact, now you even have the option to turn on all the features that were previously only available to paid users by turning on ads. So far, it seems like the ads are not intrusive (I have yet to see a full-screen ad). Recently, it even got an update to support Android Auto. More on that later.

The artists, songs, albums, and genres sections work as expected, except there are more sections - folders and even composers. Everything is very smooth and very well done. There is also a podcast and video playback section. Playlist management is also very good - simply go into any secion and hit the multi-select button. Then you can choose as many tracks, albums, or whatever else as you like and add them to a playlist. Also, you can choose a song, album, or whatever else to play right after the current track is finished - another very handy feature

And while I'm at the playlists, let's not forget a feature Rocket Music Player has that no other app I've seen has had: auto-playlists, or as this app calls it, Live Lists. Go into the playlists section, hit the menu button, and click "new Live List". Then you can add "rules" for the tracks that should go into your playlist, and for those rules you have a variety of possible criteria: Title, Date Added, Year, Play Count, and, oh, right, Rating. Yes, you read right. There are seriously too few music apps that support the standard 5-star rating system, but this one does. Back to the Live List feature, though: I won't go through how it works, because I could write an entire article on that alone.

The now playing screen is clean and useful with all the controls you would expect. You can also access a 5 band equalizer - or a 10-band equalizer with bass boosting if you have ads enabled, rate the track, set the track as a ringtone, set a sleep timer, or show the songs embedded lyrics - yes, you read correctly. This app supports embedded lyrics.

You can also use this app to edit tags and to edit album art, which is also very useful. The only thing you can't do here is have it search for album - that's a paid feature even for ad-enabled users.

With a recent update it now also supports Android Auto. While I don't have a car, nevermind a car that supports Android Auto, I've tested it with the Android Auto app, and it seems to work fairly well.

There is also a decent amount of settings you can tinker around with, with some of them only available if you have ads enabled. Some of the features include stopping after every song, headset options, themes and other options related to the look and feel of the app. If you enable ads, you have options such as crossfading, replay gain (also known as volume levelling), gapless playback,

The app generally doesn't run in the background when it isn't supposed to, and doesn't seem to be too heavy on system resources when running in the background.

Overall, this is a solid, fast, and useful app. The option to enable ads for extra features offers the best of both worlds - if you don't want ads, you can use the app without ads and still have a very good music player; if you don't mind ads, you get some extra goodies on top of it all. If you're looking for a music player with a good set of features and one that's easy to use - this is it, I can recommend it without any reservations.