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Looking for Perfect Media Player - For Car Stereo

D

Doctor Wizard

Lurker
I have an Android-based, in-dash, car stereo. An ATOTO A6, running Marshmallow. It's great, and I love it - mostly. The stock apps are all lame, but I can load whatever I want onto it. The only app I cannot find a decent replacement for is the stock media player, the most important one of all! Look thru the Play Store though, and the number of media player apps is overwhelming! I've tried at least 20 so far, and a lot of them aren't even useable, much less what I want. I do not mind paying for a good media player that meets my needs, but it needs to have a trial period or other such free demo to test it first.

I would really appreciate everyone's comments and suggestions about what media player apps I should try!

Absolute Requirements:
  • Must support playing media from a micro-SD card, and not the main storage. I'm amazed at how many apps won't do this, or don't do it correctly. While quite a few allow to choose a media folder, they then won't find it, or scan it, or some other quirk or glitch.
  • Must support existing .m3u playlists already on the SD card. No, I do not wan't to recreate them, I have too many and I spent too long getting them all just right. Again, I'm surprised at how many apps won't do this.
  • Must support a large media collection, 80+GB and 10,000+ songs. Prefer that it NOT try to index everything, particularly since I only play playlists. Could care less about playing by artist, album, genre, or year. I have pre-built playlists for that. Playing by folder would be handy though. I don't stream either.
Desired Features:
  • A skinning or theming function, that not only allows you to choose colors, but which buttons and information is displayed, where, at what size. I can't read tiny text from the driver's seat, and the stereo has hard buttons for next, back, play/pause, mute... so don't need those onscreen or to waste screen real estate for them. Wanna show album art, but that shouldn't dominate the whole screen. I am techno-skilled enough to create my own skin if I can't find one I like.
  • And finally, the most desired feature of all, one that keeps track of what playlist, what song, and where it was at when power is lost, and will resume there (or near) when power is restored.
That last one is the real tricky one. When you shut off the ignition key, the Android system does not do a full shutdown, but rather goes into a deep sleep mode. It still has electrical power from the car battery, but all apps including all background processes stop, the screen goes black, and the amplifier shuts down. When the ignition is turned on, Android boots within just a few seconds, all background processes resume, and all apps that were loaded and running before the shutdown will resume (for the most part). The lame stock media player app is able to handle this. I'm guessing it probably writes it's song/list status & location to a file or non-volatile memory every few seconds. No media player I have tried thus far other than the lame stock app seems to have any function to (correctly) do this. A few of them I tried had features that vaguely sounded like it might work, but I couldn't seem to get it to.
It occured to me to use IFTTT or other event scripting app to pause the media player when entering sleep mode and to resume it when it awakes, but none of the event apps listed any system events they would respond to like sleep and wake (or at least any events with names that sounded like that). Does anyone have any suggestions / guidance / insight there?

Thanks in advance!

The ones I have tried so far which at least meet the requirements (but not the desired) features and are at least usable include Foobar2000, Media Monkey, VLC, and Rocket Player.
Ones I couldn't get to work for assorted reasons include Audify, MP3 Player, Music Player, Musicolet, and MX Player.
 
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I use Pulsar +.... Can read all music from the micro SD card, playlists, skins, and never an issue. Check out the trail version first and see if you like it
 
Good news. I downloaded, installed and opened "VLC media player for Android" app. Yes, it's free. It took several minutes for the app to reformat the individual pre-recorded songs and many albums (1,414 music files total) on my USB stick. The music was downloaded from the web and some CD's using my desktop computer. About half were troublesome .WMA format files that the pre-installed A6 media player could not play and skipped over them one by one.

I also (this is optional) copied all the music on the VLC reformatted USB stick and pasted it into the A6 internal memory. Then under Settings -> Extra settings -> Audio -> Advanced -> Audio output, I selected OpenSL ES. It took a good deal of patience to do this as the on-screen copy, paste, etc. control buttons are tiny in the upper right and required a lot of taps to get responses. Every one of the music songs now plays well.

I have not yet determined whether the VLC reformatted files are lossy or lostless. I understand that the VLC player app can play FLAC format files (which are lostless and may sound better). Thus I would recommend converting your original music files into that format, writing the FLAC music files to a USB stick, connecting the stick to your A6, opening the VLC player app and allowing it to do its initial processing, if any, to the files and then playing music. Then if you want you can transfer the files to A6's internal memory.

Enjoy, --mike


Doctor Wizard said:
I have an Android-based, in-dash, car stereo. An ATOTO A6, running Marshmallow. It's great, and I love it - mostly. The stock apps are all lame, but I can load whatever I want onto it. The only app I cannot find a decent replacement for is the stock media player, the most important one of all! Look thru the Play Store though, and the number of media player apps is overwhelming! I've tried at least 20 so far, and a lot of them aren't even useable, much less what I want. I do not mind paying for a good media player that meets my needs, but it needs to have a trial period or other such free demo to test it first.

I would really appreciate everyone's comments and suggestions about what media player apps I should try!

Absolute Requirements:
  • Must support playing media from a micro-SD card, and not the main storage. I'm amazed at how many apps won't do this, or don't do it correctly. While quite a few allow to choose a media folder, they then won't find it, or scan it, or some other quirk or glitch.
  • Must support existing .m3u playlists already on the SD card. No, I do not wan't to recreate them, I have too many and I spent too long getting them all just right. Again, I'm surprised at how many apps won't do this.
  • Must support a large media collection, 80+GB and 10,000+ songs. Prefer that it NOT try to index everything, particularly since I only play playlists. Could care less about playing by artist, album, genre, or year. I have pre-built playlists for that. Playing by folder would be handy though. I don't stream either.
Desired Features:
  • A skinning or theming function, that not only allows you to choose colors, but which buttons and information is displayed, where, at what size. I can't read tiny text from the driver's seat, and the stereo has hard buttons for next, back, play/pause, mute... so don't need those onscreen or to waste screen real estate for them. Wanna show album art, but that shouldn't dominate the whole screen. I am techno-skilled enough to create my own skin if I can't find one I like.
  • And finally, the most desired feature of all, one that keeps track of what playlist, what song, and where it was at when power is lost, and will resume there (or near) when power is restored.
That last one is the real tricky one. When you shut off the ignition key, the Android system does not do a full shutdown, but rather goes into a deep sleep mode. It still has electrical power from the car battery, but all apps including all background processes stop, the screen goes black, and the amplifier shuts down. When the ignition is turned on, Android boots within just a few seconds, all background processes resume, and all apps that were loaded and running before the shutdown will resume (for the most part). The lame stock media player app is able to handle this. I'm guessing it probably writes it's song/list status & location to a file or non-volatile memory every few seconds. No media player I have tried thus far other than the lame stock app seems to have any function to (correctly) do this. A few of them I tried had features that vaguely sounded like it might work, but I couldn't seem to get it to.
It occured to me to use IFTTT or other event scripting app to pause the media player when entering sleep mode and to resume it when it awakes, but none of the event apps listed any system events they would respond to like sleep and wake (or at least any events with names that sounded like that). Does anyone have any suggestions / guidance / insight there?

Thanks in advance!

The ones I have tried so far which at least meet the requirements (but not the desired) features and are at least usable include Foobar2000, Media Monkey, VLC, and Rocket Player.
Ones I couldn't get to work for assorted reasons include Audify, MP3 Player, Music Player, Musicolet, and MX Player.
Click to expand...
 
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For whoever it may help, I went through my MP3 collection using "TagScanner" and renamed all of my files with

\%artist%\%album%\%disc%%track%%title%

and no dashes or spaces.

So, they come out like "101Song Title".mp3 Renaming all of your filenames in this manner lets the default player play the stupid tracks in order. In my example, I have a folder called Music and my tree comes out like
Music-
Artist-
Album-
101Song1.mp3
102Song2.mp3
...
201Song1.mp3
etc.

It was making me crazy trying to determine the sorting behavior of the default application as there is no settings applet for it anywhere, so you don't even get to tell it where to look for media files
The app just displays the song title, not the filename, but with this file naming scheme, it plays the files in album order, not alphabetically...

Oh, and the "no spaces and no dashes" part is VERY important, because if you leave spaces or add dashes, it strips that part and sorts the list alphabetically anyway.
 
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