Our Review:

Meridian Player plays music and videos. In this review, I will be covering the music section. It has a suprising amount of funcionality for an app of this type, and enough to make it a decent music player. Oh, and it has ratings. More on that later.

One note before I get going: this app requires you to give it permission to your phone, and will simply close if you don't. According to the developer, this is necessary in order to do some verification when it comes to the pro version. This is, of course, complete nonsense - in fact, Google's first tenet for working with unique identifiers is "Avoid using hardware identifiers" - the IMEI Meridian wants being a prime example of a hardware identifier.

The interface is a little confusing at first, but you get used to it. It also isn't the most elegant interface, either, but it's not ugly, either. The artists, songs, albums, and genres sections work as expected - and it also has a "writers" section, probably better known as "composers" on many desktop programs. Playlist management is decent, if somewhat odd. The now playing list is called "Now Music", but otherwise it's fine. The now playing screen works as expected.

It also has quite a few interesting features. It has tag editing, along with album art editing. It also supports the 5-star rating system. You can filter your music according to it - for instance, you can only show songs that have a 4 star rating or higher. The only odd thing is it doesn't seem to read the ratings that some of my music files definitely already do have. It also has a decent equalizer, except the on/off switch is not very easy to access.

This app seems to take a little over 35MB RAM when running in the background, which is acceptable. It doesn't seem to run in the background when not needed. Another thing that is slightly disappointing is that there are no playback controls in the notification, even though I have the "rich notification" enabled in the settings.

Overall, this app is pretty interesting, but still a little rough around the edges. Oh and for heaven's sake, get rid of the requirement for it to access the phone permission. If you really need a link to the developer document on that, I'll be glad to send it...