On desktop I use MPD for playing music, but I’ve been trying to find the best music players for Android for some time. While that search was completed rather soon, I thought that the journey would be good material for an article. I’ll be unofficially reviewing some music players that I thought were outstanding and explain why Auxio came out on top.
Searching for a good music player
My phone uses a custom ROM, ArrowOS, and I think (could be wrong) it didn’t come with a music player preinstalled. That’s fine since I was willing to go find a third party player, but not just any music player would do. First off, I don’t even have the Play Store on my phone, and all music players on the Play Store were off the table even if I did have it. You’re probably wondering how would I download anything without using the Play Store by now. For those that don’t know, Android allows you to install third party software that isn’t found on the Play Store.
There’s a very nice alternative software center for Android called F-Droid, which offers lots of FOSS (free and open source software) apps that doesn’t require Google junk to be on your phone. Anyone using Android can start using F-Droid and I highly recommend you to check it out. I have an article covering why you would want to use F-Droid, give it a read. For those of you using iOS, well you’re likely SoL and are stuck with the App Store.
So anyways, all the music players I were to download had to be available through F-Droid or some other non-Google repository. That was my requirement, and I’m happy to say that there was a good selection of well made FOSS music players out there.
Why not Spotify like a normal person?
Besides the fact that streaming service apps are only available on the Play Store, I don’t like streaming services so I don’t use them and was not looking to start using them as well. I have my own collection of music on my devices and just want a simple, offline player. I don’t want ads or have to pay to listen to music that I don’t even own, that’s just dumb.
What I was looking for in a music player
Besides the FOSS requirement, there are a few more features that I wanted my music player to have: good design, nice features, and reliable metadata reading. Design might not seem like an important factor since your phone is typically off while music plays, but a music player is a program you have to interface very often to do anything more complicated than pausing or skipping tracks. A nice feature is set is appreciable; I don’t tinker too much so I don’t use EQ or replay gain, but having some customization or simple features is cool. Metadata reading is crucial, since otherwise all kinds of problems occur: album art doesn’t display, track titles aren’t shown properly, dates are missing, and more.
Introducing the candidates
After some searching for music players, here’s the ones I liked the most: Vinyl Music Player, Music Player GO, Metro, and Auxio. Before reviewing them, I want to remind you again that all of these music players are really great pieces of software and feel completely different from each other. They also all have their own downsides, but these are subjective so keep that in mind. Also, I’m running Android 11 and therefore cannot test out Material You compatibility, but that’s a rather trivial feature to me anyways.
Music Player GO (MPG)
This is the first music player that I tried out back in February. The developer states ‘100% made in Italy’, so immediately you can feel the pizza flow through. MPG has an intuitive design and looks pretty good. At the bottom, you can sort your music by name, album, artist, playlist, and even underlying directory structure. The order of these icons are changeable, but the settings icon at the right cannot be removed. The display option of each category cannot be changed, so your list of artists and songs will always look like they do in the picture above.
In the settings options, you get a decent amount of customization: themes and accent colours, notification settings, toggle animations, adjust how much fast seeking skips, and headphone and fine volume management. One thing that’s unique to MPG is the current song screen. Instead of a full screen display with album art, progress, volume bar, and other info, MPG uses a compact playing screen. In this screen, you can choose the playback speed, save a particular moment in the song to jump back into, customize EQ, add to favourites, and toggle the repeat mode, as well as typical pause/stop/forward/rewind options. The playing screen also shows file details, and you can tap the track name to see the artist’s songs. I like it, it’s a unique design.
MPG passes my tests; it looks good enough, parses metadata properly, and has a decent feature set that I can get used to. The Github page sees updates very regularly, which means that this music player should continue to receive continuous development. Overall, MPG was nice to use, but I had a few complaints about its UX. The current song screen is nice but the icons are slightly unintuitive. I wish the display modes for songs, artists, and albums could be tweaked a bit. However, MPG is meant to focus on simplicity so this is a really minor gripe.
Vinyl Music Player (VMP)
After trying MPG, I came across this one while looking for more music players. VMP is a fork of Phonograph, a different music player. VMP makes Phonograph’s pro features free and removes proprietary parts. VMP has a unique UI as well and supports more features than MPG. The current song screen occupies the whole screen, and you can toggle between two visual styles. VMP can even fetch song lyrics automatically.
This happens because VMP can auto download missing metadata for your songs, which can be extremely convenient when something is incorrect or missing. If you don’t want it to connect to the internet, you can disable the feature. VMP also allows you to manually edit metadata like tags or album art. This is a very useful feature when you realize a song has incorrect metadata. VMP also offers more customizable settings such as white/blacklisting directories and a playlist of songs most played and skipped. Overall, it’s a more developed music player than MPG.
The real strength of VMP is its metadata handling. Android’s default APIs to read music metadata are kind of broken. For instance, some tags can’t be read or particular characters in the album title get interpretted as gibberish. Google can’t be bothered to fix it because they want you to pay for Youtube Music instead. VMP solves the metadata problem by storing metadata independently, so the proper data for each song and album displays correctly. It’s very noticeable, I have a few songs that have release dates that can’t be parsed because of Google’s broken APIs, but VMP can. So if having proper metadata displayed is your top priority, which is arguably very important, VMP is probably the best music player on Android for you.
VMP is a fantastic music player; it’s more feature rich and customizable than MPG, and is unbeatable in handling metadata. My only wish is that I wish I could change the font and the looks of the current playing screen. The font seems to be a stock font used by Google and personally I don’t like it. The current playing UI is probably the worst out of all the music players to me.
Metro
The next program I found was Metro, which is also a fork of another project, Retro Music Player. Metro does the same things as VMP did to Phonograph; it made paid features free and removed proprietary dependencies. Metro is by far the most visually tweakable music player and is mostly designed around that; a large portion of its settings is dedicated to changing visual styles. Metro also features a very nice widget that fits with any wallpaper. It’s pure text, with no images or borders to ruin your homescreen. This widget is something I wish all music players had. As for other settings, you get around the same amount as VMP for non-visual aspects. Like VMP, Metro can edit metadata.
Metro also passes all of my requirements: it looks good and is super tweakable, metadata is parsed properly, and it has a good set of features. The biggest flaw with Metro is that it seems to be dormant or dead. While the program will continue to work and music players don’t get security vulnerabilities, it is sad to know that no more development is happening as of now. The last update was made well over a year ago. Other than the dead development, Metro’s (more specifically the upstream Retro’s) settings focus too much on UI customizability. Realistically, you’re soon going to settle for one theme and stick with it. In this sense, Metro’s customizability can be seen as somewhat bloated. Overall, Metro is still a great music player even if it’s a dead project. If you want your music player to have extremely customizable appearances, Metro is a good choice.
Auxio
And so now I arrive at Auxio, after realizing that Metro is effectively a project frozen in time. Initially, Auxio was different from the other music players in a bad way. It had relatively little features and customization, and can’t edit any metadata or show lyrics. It felt like a much more minimal and work-in-progress program. My opinion changed as I used it, and now it’s my preferred music player.
Auxio has a rather simple UI; you can sort by song, album, artist, and genre. The sorting view isn’t customizable, so you can’t have a grid of icons like the other music players. The currently playing screen looks simple and clean, and I really like the font. The settings options are rather limited; you can change colour scheme and accent colour, headphone settings, replay gain, and directory blacklisting. Overall, Auxio focuses on playing music and not much more, which is a respectable design scope decision. In retrospect, I never touched 80% of the features offered in Metro or VMP.
Auxio has several flaws though. First, its opinionated and small scope means that many features you may want are likely to be missing and likely have no chance of being implemented. For me, I would have wanted to see lyrics as an option. Additionally, Auxio is missing rather basic features such as creating playlists (!) and proper rescanning of your music library for now. Overall, the program definitely feels like a work-in-progress project, the developer is claiming to add these features in later. Once Auxio matures more, I think it’ll be a really solid minimal music player.
Plenty of music players in the sea
There are tons of other music players on F-Droid, and they’re all great homebrew programs that aren’t made for commercialization or sell your data. If you use Android and haven’t tried these music players out, go try them. Setting up F-Droid is very straightforward.
Honourable mention: BlackHole
I didn’t mention them, but there really is a lot of other programs out there on F-Droid. One of them, BlackHole, seems to be an extremely good candidate for those that use Spotify and Youtube Music. It acts as a local player and can stream (and totally legally download) songs, without logging in to anything. The UI looks clean and there should be enough features. I didn’t use it because I don’t stream and therefore BlackHole is excessive for me, but if you’re reliant on streaming for music you’ll want to check out BlackHole. This one is even coming to iOS, so the Apple people can also join in.