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DoubleTwist, MixZing, bTunes, Cubed... best media player?

I still like bTunes. It's so simple and intuitive (like the iPod, ugh, did I just say that?) and has a good widget.

Unfortunately, it looks like it's no longer being developed (I saw a rumor saying the developer passed away). I don't know if it works under Froyo, so I might have to give it up soon.

What's the different with the paid Mixzing? I understand no ads, but what's the "unlimited access to lock screen widget" mean?
 
I still haven't decided on a player yet either, but I'm leaning towards the stock Vibrant player because it is really nice. Besides Lithium, I'd also recommend Zingly. It has a very nice user interface (almost retro) and even plays videos. There's also Astro beta, which is pretty fugly, but has a ton of interesting features, such as its own podcatcher with bookmarking feature.
 
hi guys, im using isyncr, but i some of the songs dont show the album art, even though its there on itunes...any ideas. I'm using mixzing, but looking into new players after reading this thread.
Thanks
 
I've found simply embedding your album art into the tags works the best. That way, there's no second guessing. It's a one-click affair using MP3Tag.
 
Are there are music apps out there that fully support the bluetooth controls for when im driving in my car? Thats where i listen to my music the most and the best app I found that worked for that was btunes which is sadly not being developed now :( I just find it really useful if say im using my phone as a sat nav, that i can still change music tracks or lower the volume/pause it without swapping from my sat nav program.
 
Daz666 said:
Are there are music apps out there that fully support the bluetooth controls for when im driving in my car? Thats where i listen to my music the most and the best app I found that worked for that was btunes which is sadly not being developed now :( I just find it really useful if say im using my phone as a sat nav, that i can still change music tracks or lower the volume/pause it without swapping from my sat nav program.
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I asked that same question (should be AVRCP I believe and not A2DP):
http://androidforums.com/android-ap...-players-support-bluetooth-a2dp-controls.html

I found that Mixzing and Doubletwist support it. If you have both installed it might start the other one on accident when you hit next\back.

Even though Mixzing is BUTT ugly, I use it because it has landscape mode and faster on my Captivate
 
Cheers, I'll give Mixzing a try! :) I don't mind too much about the look of it as long as all the functionality is there and if it's any good ill probably get the pro version. I tried Doubletwist but it wanted me to sync my phone with my pc to show any music.
 
I have been getting a lot of fc on bTunes. Seems like it happens when the headphones are plugged in the most. But then again i dont ever listen to them without something plugged into it. So I have been trying most of the popular ones. I like the feel of cubed right now. I really like that typography style lockscreen control and the widget looks awesome. Too bad, I even paid for the full version of bTunes. If I can figure out whats causing that or if bTunes fixes it I would probably stick with that.
 
I tried MixZing today but sadly it didnt work with the bluetooth controls in my car so I'll have to keep searching for a decent app which supports this, I had selected the option to enable the headset controls too but with no luck. Is this a known bug or does it only work sucessfully in the pro version? Btunes would be perfect if it still worked. It would be good if a developer could modify it so that when you select your music from a folder it is shown in Btunes.
 
MixZing seems to have one fatal flaw: Even if I stop the music playing, and exit the app, it continues to use cpu in the background. I understand it would do this if music is actually playing, but it shouldn't use resources if nothing is playing.
 
Is there an app that deals with both music AND podcasts?

I need something that downloads, manages and plays podcasts, and is also a good music player. Must have bookmarks - or whatever it's called when I want to leave 1 audio file to go to another, but when I come back, the app remembers where I was up to. As well as bluetooth A2DP and AVRCP.
 
Hey guys, Ive got Btunes working again now on 2.2! I read a comment from a guy called jcmtyler who figured out that your music folder in settings should now be set as /mnt/sdcard/Music which has worked brilliantly and my music is showing again now! So I wont have to search for anymore music players :)
 
Daz666 said:
Hey guys, Ive got Btunes working again now on 2.2! I read a comment from a guy called jcmtyler who figured out that your music folder in settings should now be set as /mnt/sdcard/Music which has worked brilliantly and my music is showing again now! So I wont have to search for anymore music players :)
Click to expand...

Thanks, now I have to somehow remember that tip for when 2.2 comes out for the Droid X.
 
I've been reading these boards ever since I got my Nexus One and have been avoiding signing up, however I just had to give my two cents on this haha. I've been using bTunes for months now, and though I like it overall, the little bugs and quirks continued to drive me crazy. Notably the album art getting switched up, and also when you add a song to a playlist it loses your place on the artist list(starts you back at the top).

Last night I was going through the multimedia section and stumbled upon 'Music Player Pro'. It is far and away the best music player i've found yet. It's sort of a hybrid between the standard music app and apps like MixZing. The album art grabber is phenomenal and lets you select from multiple covers. When searching by Artist it also grabs images of the artist. The interface is clean and snappy. There are 3 skins to choose from currently(hoping we can do custom ones in the future). There is also 2 ways to display the various artist/song/album lists. It includes widgets, custom playlists, recently added playlist, genre's, etc. The developer seems pretty active and again, for being so new on the market, the app is AWESOME!

I highly recommend you all check it out. It was honestly the first app I ever even took the time to rate in the market.
 
It does look like a pretty good app :) Btunes will probably always win for me tho because it's the only application that works with my cars controls. I'm surprised that there is only one music app that does this tho, even mixzing was supposed to work with bluetooth but didn't. With bluetooth support I would probably go for Music player pro
 
Daz666 said:
It does look like a pretty good app :) Btunes will probably always win for me tho because it's the only application that works with my cars controls. I'm surprised that there is only one music app that does this tho, even mixzing was supposed to work with bluetooth but didn't. With bluetooth support I would probably go for Music player pro
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Understandable. I loved btunes, but it drove me nuts that the dev has basically disappeared. Especially since the problems are so small, yet so frustrating. I will say, I emailed the developer of music player pro right after I posted on here earlier and he got back to me a little while ago. He seems to be VERY active with fixing bugs and adding features so you might consider emailing him about your bluetooth concerns. I basically gave him a list of 9 usability things to make the app even slicker and 2 of which he had already completed and should be released in the next few days. He was also very responsive to the other ideas.

Kind of cool too, I told him I am a web/ui designer/developer and sent him a few quick mock-ups and it looks like I might be helping with some of the default skins. I'm pretty stoked. I really want just 1 music app that does it all instead of having 3 or 4 apps that each do a few things well ha.
 
Ive tried almost all mentioned here and to me, btunes is the best! I just wish they'd add EQ and smart playlist support and it would be even better!
 
hey all, had to add my input here. I've been going through the media player hell also, finally am trying mort for the first time.

I'm experienced with meridian (great features, don't love the UI but it's ok, plenty of codec support + video playback, very professional, seems, but I could be simply getting a placebo effect here, that it's a little higher on the resource use than some other players).

stock player: ewe, blech. major resource hog on my 2.2 phone (froyd 1.5).

mixzing: not sure about this one yet, seems relatively light on resource use (nice), plenty of amazing features, but free version is missing stuff I want. of course, tha'ts how they sell the full version right? Just not sure yet about it, I think it's pretty good, and has built in defeatable EQ, a very nice thing to see finally on android. UI is vaguely similar to meridian, good enough, not super original, but very usable (mimicking my thoughts of meridian).

btunes: nice UI, I'm not an itunes lover (actually dislike some of it's UI, sorry apple, love you guys!). seems nice and relatively low resource use, but I find the playlist concept confusing. maybe that's why I don't like itunes all that much also? :-) so could just be my preference, but I found it confusing.

mortplayer: wow, i like the UI better imho, I like the relatively light weight resource use (so far, will know mroe after further testing), I'm old school, I like it to play my folder structure, not my playlists (which is how I always setup my ipods too fwiw). Just not a playlist guy I guess. it's like, why create a playlist? the album's already in a folder organized by artist/album. Lots of extra work for only one specific feature that I can imagine is worth using a playlist for - making a mix playback (one song from this album, one from that album, and so on). Otherwise, playlists = I just don't get it.

There are others I've dabbled in too - lithium, cool look on player screen, nice animated spinning thing, but seriously, what's so good about this player? I didn't spend much time wtih it though, so limited in features from what I got out of it. Maybe I just don't get it, but too light weight in UI/features for me. 3Cubed... erm... let's play where did the widget disappear to and how do you place the invisible widget? ooooooooook. cool cube thing, totally not taking advantage of how it could utilize that UI however, and the player itself is pretty basic from what I recall, cover art worked sometimes, not others, and I kept losing the player controls in the widget. Maybe just me... but doesn't seem even ready for beta yet imho.

So there you go. My current choice is mortplayer.

like it. widget actually has useful controls on it as well fwiw. swiping works great, no stupid files being picked up that I don't want to play, this is jsut a better way of finding your music. At least for me :-)

Sound quality I'm not sure about yet - haven't done serious comparisons yet, but I get the feeling that mort has better sound quality than some others. Could very well be in my head though, I have done ZERO true comparisons and ZERO blind abx comparisons. Nor any tests with equipment.

If I get serious about this then I'll actually take it into my recording studio and do some real analysis to see how things turn out, but I'm so short on time these days I wouldn't expect that to actually happen, sorry.

Other thing is battery life - but I think my hero sucks with all of them. If one stands out as better I'll let you know. I know cpu is different between different players, but hard to measure so far for me. just how my phone works while playing music is my own subjective test at the moment... how well applications menu scrolls in launcher pro while playign music, etc etc
 
of course on froyd we also have dsp manager, I suspect it's available for other froyo roms as well, not just the xda-based one I'm running. great tool, nice (still basically graphical though) eq, but does cut into cpu use a bit as one would expect. does various room simulations and (rather vaguely defined and very much preset-style) compression as well, if desired.
 
ok, to follow up. running meridian (default setup, no weird dsp going on etc), one hour used 13% of my battery.

running mort, again default setup, actually turned up to a higher playback volume than I had in meridian a lot of the time, I used only about 9% of my battery in one hour.

I didn't recharge in between, just uninstalled meridian and installed mort.

now my battery is around 55% give or take, so this isn't with unfair battery charge (like how it stays at 100% charge far longer than it should which would give false readings etc).

So if not really scientific, it at least indicates to me that my gut instinct that mort is lighter in resource use appears to have been correct, at least compared to my (again gut instinct) feeling that meridian is relatively heavy on resource use.

Both players were running most of the time in teh background (back-exited out of the actual player itself), and screen was off. same headphones fwiw.

Cheers
 
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