Best Free Music Player and Organizer for Android

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Introduction

Android. The Operating System that is flexible, can do everything, can do social networking, can do media, music... wait a minute. That "music" app on my desktop is supposed to be my music player, and organizer? What kind of junk is this? On my high-end Android?

Let's face it: the stock Android music player can, well, play music. That's about where it ends. It does the typical stuff, sort by artist, song name, create playlists, whatever. While some companies have added a skin to Android's music player on their device, it usually doesn't add all too much. Hey, I'm on a Samsung Galaxy Player, which is basically an Android mp3 player. And I've got basically that music player, just with the Samsung skin. Fine for basic playback, but what do you do if you want something more than "shuffle"?

That's where Android's magic shines - you can use whatever app you want to play music, and, if the developer did it correctly, you won't even notice that you're not using the default app. Here are the best music players and organizers for Android.

Discussion

These are the music players I reviewed:

[2]Winamp is the first program. This app offers good functionality, but is also very easy to use.

That easy-to-use part is probably what you'll notice first. Right from the start, what you get is a very clean interface, without anything complicated. It's a comfort to the eyes, after seeing some other more complicated apps. It's divided into Artists, Albums, Songs, Genres, Playlists, SHOUTcast, Equalizer (not available in the free version), and Free Music. On the bottom, you get your music controls.

It will have your music the first time you start it up - no searching, no nothing. It's there. The Artists through Playlists parts of the app are the parts that have your music in it. Again, it's all very simple: Artists, Songs, Albums, and Genres work as expected. In the Albums section you can see your album art. Scrolling is smooth almost everywhere except in the albums, when there is a lot of album art. Playlists are when you run into the first bump. There are a couple of auto playlists - Recently added, Recently played, and Top played, which are nice. But on your own playlists, you can't add songs to them from within the playlist. You have to go somewhere else, long-press on the song you want to add, and click "add to playlist", and choose your playlist. And... you have to add the songs individually, doing this same procedure for every song.

On the other hand, it's easier to add songs to what is called the "queue". This is basically the equivalent of the "Now Playing" playlist in Windows Media Player. In order to add songs to this playlist, you can, for example, go into a specific genre, and add all of the songs of that genre. It's very nice to have this - you can just add your songs to here, and it will automatically play, no setting up a new playlist, no whatever. And, if you like the playlist you put together, you can save it as a playlist.

If you have Winamp on your desktop, you can also sync Winamp on Android with it.

The SHOUTcast feature is also nice for those of you who are tired of the music you have on your device, but who don't like what is playing on the local radio station. Or, who don't have an FM chip in their device. The selection is massive, and ~~I think I can safely assume that there are over a thousand stations in there~~ WinAmp claims there are over 47 000 stations available, with all sorts of different categories. So, whatever you're looking for, you'll probably find it. The music is also tagged, so there's no more "I heard this song, I don't know what it's called...". The SHOUTcast feature, provided you have a WiFi or data connection, is absolutely great.

There is also the free music part. In my region, you have a free music download store, with those "free deals", but it seems to be one of those things where you get the songs for free that no one wants. You also have a service where you can stream full albums to your device.

Equalizer, well, you have to pay for that.

The controls are also great. There is what looks like a menu button, which gets you the list of tracks you're playing, your normal backward-play/paus-forward buttons, and the "Winamp" button, which gets you back to the starting screen. The backward and forward buttons can be used for fast-forwarding and rewinding as well. Tilt your device to get it into landscape orientation, and you have controls for shuffle and repeat. Above the buttons, you have a bar with information about the music that's playing. Pull that up just the way you pull down the notifications tray on Android, and you have your now playing screen. Brilliant and intuitive.

There is also a "lock-screen player", which is basically the same thing as the RealPlayer lockscreen widget. Basically the same thing applies here as to RealPlayer - see below. The one difference is that you can turn it off if you don't like it - in fact, it's off by default.

Headset button controls work as well, but you have to enable it in the options. Single press to play/pause, double press to go to the next track, and triple-press to go to the previous track.

The one disappointment with music playing is that the app seems to need about 30MB of memory to run in the background. For those of you who don't know, that's a lot. For comparison, lightweight applications can use down to 5MB when running in the background fully. That memory footprint could shed a couple of pounds.

Overall, however, this is a very good music playing app. It gets the job done easily and intuitively. If you are looking for a music playing app that is easy to use, but has a good amount of functionality, this is it.

TTPod Music Player is next. Probably the first thing you'll notice about this app is its non-native look. And the fact that it uses too much Japanese. Or Chinese. But more on that later. [3]

Sure enough, this player is skinnable. And oh yes can it look great. You can choose among a couple of built-in skins, usually about two, or download more. Except here already is the first point where we're running into this Japanese stuff. I'm not sure if this is only me, or if others are having this problem as well. You can tell me down in the comments.

Here, though, it shouldn't be that tough getting around the Japanese, because you can look at the screenshots, and choose which ones you would like that way.

Oh, right, and this is a music player, and not just a skinnable app. The playlist function is fairly good. From within the playlist, you can browse the file system to add songs. You get some Japanese, but with some experimenting, you can figure it out. You can add entire folders, or just files. You can also add songs when you're somewhere else, for example in an Album or in a genre. There, press menu and choose "edit". Then, you can check the songs you want to add, and click "add to...".

Otherwise, you can view your music by artists, albums, by folders, or by songs, what they call "medias". Note that you can't see any album art here. There is also a "My favourites" playlist. I haven't figured out a way of adding songs to it, however. Also interesting is the "recent added" playlist, although I don't know how recently a song has to have been added in order to be here.

Playing a song is simple. Play a song by tapping it, or pause by tapping it again. You will have a bar at the bottom of the screen with a pause/play button and a forward button. Click on the album icon to get to the now playing screen. Here, everything is simple and straightforward. Swipe left and right for a visualisation, album art, and lyrics, an interesting feature of this app. The problem is that this app ignores what is included in the file, and searches for album art and lyrics on the Internet. It's nice when it gets it right, but that's not always the case. It has a hard time working with remixes. For example, when I'm listening to the Moguai remix of "Push the Tempo", it thinks I'm listening to the original track by Fatboy Slim. This probably means that the lyrics won't be properly synchronized or incorrect. But, when it does work, it's quite nice, actually. It has synchronized lyrics, a nice addition. A note to the parents, though: it displays the full lyrics, even if you have the radio edit playing. That can be quite a shocker sometimes. On the other hand, it did let me know that iTunes actually ripped me off by selling me a radio edit without marking it as such...

You can shuffle, play a song repeatedly, use a nice 10-band equalizer, get more information and edit it, or set a sleep timer. How all of this is arranged will vary depending on your skin. In the menu, you get some more options for the lyrics, and make a ringtone out of the song. Good luck with the Japanese, though.

You also can access settings, and I was going to write about that too... except the app updated itself, only to find out the settings have mostly reverted to Japanese as well. The one thing that I did remember from before the update that stood out was the shake feature. Just like on the iPod touch, you can shake to shuffle, or go to the next song. Except here, it one-ups that. You can shake left to go to the previous song, or shake right to go to the next song. It two-ups it by letting you use the shake feature while you're not in the app, and three-ups it by letting you use it when your device is turned off. I just wish I was able to understand the settings.
Update: TTPod got updated, and it looks like the Japanese in the settings has disappeared. I will be adding the information about the settings soon.

You also have some online stuff, and recommendations, but because that is completely in Japanese, I can't get through there.

This Music Player would be great if it didn't have that whole language problem. It's not only me, either - looking at the reviews in Google Play, other people are having this problem as well. There is Japanese (or chinese, I'm not sure which one it is) everywhere, which makes some things a pain. What's worse, all the help files are also in Japanese, so that doesn't work either. Maybe I'll be able to figure it out sometime, but for now, it's a pain. If you have any suggestions, again, you can leave me a comment. Once the problem is solved, this app will probably be at the top of the list, but for now, it's just too hard to use.

[4]After that, we have Google Play Music. This is actually a service for buying music, and is part of Google's Play system. This app is basically meant to tie in with the Google Play Music service, and it doubles as a music player.
Probably the first thing you'll notice is that when you start it, it will directly go to the "recent" list - that's the recently added or played list - a very interesting idea on Google's part. And, if you're not on Ice Cream Sandwich (~~the latest~~ second-latest release of the android OS), you'll notice the app has the "Ice Cream Sandwich look" - check the screenshot to the left to see what I mean. Tip this list sideways, and you get a beautiful album art-based interface, that my opinion, looks even better than Apple's cover flow interface. Better yet, Google's done something that makes it very smooth. I'm on a 1Ghz single core processor, with way too much stuff running in the background, but this interface is super smooth. For some reason, this is the only place where this interface is used, which is quite a shame, actually - I love the interface.
The functionality is disapointing, though - there is a "Shuffle all" button, but that shuffles your entire library, not just your recent list. In fact, you can't just play all your recently added or played songs, but clicking on the album art gets you into that album - the entire one, even if some of the tracks from that album were added or played a year ago. There is an auto playlist called "last added" in the playlists section, but that playlist is completely different.
Next over from the "recent" list is the Artists list. As normal, you get a list of artists, but when you tilt your device into landscape mode, you get another nice album-based interface. It's not as nice as the one in the Recent list, but it's still good. Basically, click on the artist to see the artist's albums.
The Albums list is fairly similar to the Artists list, with the same nice Album Art interface. The song list is just a plain old song list, in portrait orientation as well as in landscape orientation. Nothing new, but then, that's not a bad thing, either. Playlists are fairly straightforward, so nothing new there. You can't add songs while in the playlists section, but you can from anywhere else using a long press or the arrow. More on that later. There are two auto-playlists, Thumbs up - songs that you've thumbs-upped in the now playing screen, and Last added. Don't ask me how far back the Last added playlist goes, though - I have stuff I've added at least a month or two ago in there, and there's no way to set how far back it goes.
The Playlist section does a lot with, well, I'm not sure what it is. It's basically the standard album art that is used for albums with no album art, but even when I have a playlist full of songs with album art, it still uses the same standard album art. It just has the title of the playlist. The Playlist section works like the artist and album section with the different interfaces in landscape and portrait, but there is honestly no point in it because of that. What would be interesting would be to have an album art "collage", a bit like in the artist section. Consider this a suggestion for the writer of this app - it's not a complaint, just an idea of mine. OK, let's get back to business.
The Genre section is like the Artists section. Nothing new, just the same goodness.
Across the whole app (except the Recent section), there's an arrow at the right or bottom right of each album, artist, or song - it does the same thing as a long press. There, you can play it, add it to a playlist, search for stuff by the same artist in the play store, or search it somewhere else. You also have access to a search button and a shortcut to the now playing screen pretty much throughout the app.
The now playing screen isn't all that bad. You have the back/play-pause/forward controls and the album art there. Click on the small arrow to pull up more details about what's playing, a seek bar, shuffle and repeat controls, and a thumbs up and thumbs down button. "Thumbs up" adds the song to the thumbs up playlist, but I'm not quite sure what the "thumbs down" does, but I'll post when I figure it out.
The one disappointment in this app is that there are no settings. Everything is the way it is, and there's nothing you can do about it. If you like it the way it is, that's fine. Personally, I'm OK with it, but not everyone will be.
On the other hand, this app consumes a nice and small memory footprint - 6-7MB, which means it will barely impact your system (if it's an older one) while playing music.
So, is this a good app for music? It's not bad - it brings some interesting new ideas into the mix. But then, this app is made by Google as a part of the Google Play system, and for that I expected more. Sure, you can upload 20 000 songs for free, which is nice provided you're in the US - in fact, you even have to download it from somewhere other than google play if you're somewhere else, even if you don't use the cloud functionality. As a music player, though, it let me down. Google made Android - the most flexible popular mobile OS, yet here, there are no settings. Google has a done a lot of innovation with Android, but there's not all too much innovation in here - the nicest interface of the app is only used in one part of the app, for example, and you can't even edit tag information in the app. Sure some other apps in this review can't either, but I expected more from Google.
Forgetting about what I was expecting from Google, it's a good app. It does have some interesting new functionality, is light, and looks great. It's just the feature end that's missing a bit, but otherwise, it's pretty good.

[5]Next up is musiXmatch [6]. This app's main feature is the lyrics. If you use this app online, the first thing you will notice is that it will look for lyrics for your music. Then, choose a song, swipe right, and you can read along with the lyrics. But let's get into that later.
Sure enough, when you start up musiXmatch, the first thing it will do is scan your music library and look for lyrics to fit with your music. If you're on a decent Internet connection, it shouldn't take too long. In my library of about 1000 songs, it took less than 30 seconds on a high speed connection. Once that's done, you can start listening to your music with lyrics. So, then, how is this like as a music player? Not bad.
The starting screen gives you a preview of what this app is going to be like: nice and simple. In the middle, you have My Music, MusicID, Favorites, and Settings. On the top right you have a search button, and on the bottom you have a bar showing you what's playing, with a play and next track button. Clicking on the album art or the song name brings you to the now playing screen. It's quite handy to have - you can control your music even when you're somewhere else in the app.
In My Music, you can view your music by albums, tracks, playlists, and artists. Under albums, you can see your albums with the album art. The album art is nice and big, except it means that, at least on my device, there are only two columns. So, you'll have to do a lot of scrolling to get to the bottom... thankfully, you can use the scroll bar on the right. The one thing that is confusing here is the arrow on the bottom right of each album. It looks like the whole bar at the bottom of the album is one button, but that arrow is actually a seperate button. If you try it out yourself, you'll understand what I mean - it's confusing at first, but you can ignore it - long pressing the album does the same thing.
Swipe right, and you're looking at your music sorted by tracks. Here the way the arrow I mentioned before works is a lot clearer. Otherwise, there's nothing new here, you have a scrollbar on the right. When you scroll with the scrollbar, it will show you what letter you're at.
To the right of that you have your playlists. No auto-playlists, though. Playlists are straight forward, except that you can't add songs from the playlists screen. Anywhere else, though, long-press something, and then you can add it to a playlist. Then, come back here, where you can reorganize the playlist, which is very simple.
Next, you have your artists. This section is quite nicely done - all of the artists are in a list, again with the scrollbar, like in the tracks section. Clicking on an artist expands the albums of that artist. Again, the arrow buttons aren't designed all too well, but you can get used to it. Click on one of the albums to get you to a new screen with a list of the songs - basically the same thing you get when you choose an album from. One disappointment, though - you can't choose an artist and play all of that artist's songs. Oh, well.
The now playing screen is fairly simple, but good. You have the song's album art in the middle, and the controls on the bottom. On the top, click on the playlist button on the left to go to your playlist, where you can also organize your playlist. Click in the middle or on the small arrow near the bottom to hide the controls and the bar on the top. Click again to bring that stuff back. It's a tad confusing at first, but you get it pretty quickly. On the bottom, you have the normal stuff - a seek bar, and repeat, previous track/rewind, play/pause, next track/fast forward, and shuffle controls.
But... we've completely forgotten about the lyrics, this app's specialty. Swipe right on the album art to find the lyrics. They're not synchronized, but I personally prefer it like this to the way it is on TTPod. On TTPod, it's synchronized, but you can't change the synchronization if it's not poperly synchronized. Lyrics here at MusiXmatch have been accurate, so far, and I love the error messages when the app doesn't have any: "Lady gaga borrowed our lyrics and is using them as a hat", "You didn't really want to listen to this, did you?", or "Clearly your music taste is better than ours", to mention a couple of examples. App developers have a sense of humor, too, you know...
To the right of the lyrics you can find even more information - where the song appears, and the artist's discography, and you can also sample songs from the same artist and find links to buy them - there's loads of information to be found here.
Aside from that, there's MusicID, which is basically the same idea as Shazam or SoundHound: your device will "listen" to the music that's playing, and use the Internet to identify it.
Back to the music side, there are also favorites, which took me a while to figure out how it works - when you're in the now playing screen, in the lyrics, you click the heart button at the top... and that's the only place you'll find it. I have no Idea why. Basically, it's supposed to be your favorite lyrics. Nothing all too useful.
In the settings, there are a couple of options - you can share the app, you can prevent the app from rotating to landscape, you can set the app to give you a notification when you're playing music in another app and it finds lyrics, and you can tell it to stop the music when you want to use MusicID. You can also rescan the library, and change the headset settings. Noteable among the headset settings is that you can prevent the music from pausing when you unplug the headset, and you can also set the music to resume when you plug it in - same goes for Bluetooth headsets.
Again, though, the memory footprint isn't great here. It's better than WinAmp, but it's still a heavy 20MB. Not too great.
Overall, as a music player, it performs decently. It has the standard features of a music player, is fairly clean with one exception, and the lyrics are nice, as long as you're online. Although you might prefer another music player, it's still worth a download as a lyrics program. But, then, we're talking about music players here...

[7]RealPlayer has always been a good media player for desktop computers. Now, it has been developed for Android.

The experience starts with a very nicely designed home screen, which slightly reminds me of Windows Media Center. RealPlayer finds your music, videos and photos very well, but it might take a little time at first. It will find your media without any progress indicator, so you might be wondering what is going on. However, once it finds your stuff, it runs very well.

The app has three parts - music, videos and photos. We will be focusing on the music part for this article.

The Music part is really well done, and is RealPlayer's strongest point. It has various automatic playlists, such as recently added and favorites, which I missed in the stock Android music player. It also has ratings, another thing I really missed in the stock player. However, managing your own playlists is where it gets a little tough. The songs are grouped by artists, and that's it. No sorting by album or song name when you're adding songs to a playlist.

When looking up songs by name, artist or album, there isn't much to say, except that the scrolling seems to be surprisingly laggy on my 1 Ghz processor.

The "now playing" screen has the standard layout - in other words, nothing new here - except that the seek bar is on the bottom. This might confuse you if you have previously used iOS. When there is music playing, you get a status bar icon, with information about what is playing in the notification tray. You can't control music from here, though. The headset button will also only play or pause the music. However, the player will accept certain commands from some headset button controlling apps on the market, meaning you can then play, pause, skip to next track, and skip to previous track.

One interesting feature to this player is the lockscreen widget. When you have music playing, and you lock your phone, you will have your lockscreen covered by something looking very similar to the now playing screen. It will let you access most of your controls very nicely. Interestingly enough, you can also pull down your notifications tray there, even if you aren't normally able to do it on your phone's lockscreen. Aside from the media controls, there is also a button to return to your "normal" lockscreen, just the way you know it, which is called the "unlock" button. It doesn't make sense, but that's the way it works.

The lockscreen widget isn't for everyone, though. If you get used to it, it will be very handy. However, if you are used to quickly unlocking your phone by hitting the power button and swiping, this will trip you - swiping does nothing here, it might only mess up the music you're listening to. You first have to hit "unlock", and then swipe. Then, when you are not playing music, everything is back to normal, confusing you once again. The biggest problem is that I have until now not been able to find a way to turn off the widget. In one sentence: great idea, but it needs some work. If you are the kind to get used to these things easily, though, you will love this widget.

On another note, gestures are not supported in this app - so if you absolutely need gestures, this app is not for you.

Overall, Realplayer has enough potential, but certain areas, like the lockscreen widget, need to be ironed out. However, if these issues do get fixed, this will be a good deal better.

More apps to be reviewed: