Music player

[daenney]

So... listening to music on Windows Phone 8 for me has been a bad experience.

I have a Nokia Lumia 920 and the Nokia Music app and though it's great for streaming music it's actually a dreadful app for listening to music locally. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any good alternatives.

Stuff that's really bugging me:

• Nokia Music can't deal with multi-disc albums correctly, it just ignores that ID3-Tag so you have 5 consecutive number 1 numbers from 5 different discs.
• Nokia Music can't deal with multi-artist albums correctly, even when marked as a 'compilation', you need to use a playlist to do that.
• Because of the multi-artist thing the albums view gets littered with multiple 'copies' of the same album since it's using the artist tag to break up identically named albums.
• It tries to push its streaming stuff which results in it being not so effortless to access your local music.
• You can't seek.

On the bright side the UI of the app is visually pleasing.

There's a few things that come up in the Store when you search for music player but those apps have either a terrible UI, lack most features or need you to use their streaming music service.

• Music / Music Pro and Music Player (in the different colours) have a terrible interface
• Music_player hasn't got much of an interface
• Music Player has a similar issue to Music_player, it's just a list of songs
• Advanced music seems to only do shuffle through a songlist
• Music Player, seems to satisfy most requirements but just crashes / doesn't play audio.
• Random Music Player only does random.

I'm basically looking for Windows Media Player here, something that can function as a decent Music Library manager on the phone and is a capable audio player. Does anyone know of such an app, or know if such an app is in development?

 

[th0mas96]

you could also use the normal windows phone one instead of the nokia app, but it isn't perfect either. Someone on XDA is currently working on an improved player, it's still in beta and currently he only focusses on functions and not on interface, but maybe it'll be a better one when it's finished.

 

[daenney]

With normal I assume you mean the "Music+Video" app? Unfortunately that one suffers from the same issues as Nokia Music, except that it isn't pushing you to use the Nokia Music streaming service.

I'll have a look around XDA, thanks for the tip.

 

[th0mas96]

Yeup, afaik these 2 are the only ones that at least look like a planned app, unlike the ones on the market place. Unfortunately, there are no better apps available that feature more function or another UI.

 

[AngryNil]

What happens with compilation albums? They work fine on my WP7 device using Music+Videos. I'd advise you to try out Music+Videos with the setting to connect to Xbox Music turned off, and use Nokia Music for streaming only.

 

[daenney]

It doesn't seem to be recognising the compilation tag, that or it's skilfully ignoring it on my side in both Nokia Music and Music+Video.

 

[AngryNil]

What I do for compilation tracks is have the same album title and artist ("Various Artists"), then use different individual track titles and artists. Would that work for you?

 

[coffeetime1]

I've bought a Lumia 620 as a 'cheap' phone to take with me to various music festivals over the summer, rather than my music stuffed iP5 64GB as my insurance won't cover the latter. Much about WP8 I love: the Office/Skydrive integration is awesome relative to the 'read only' iOS Skydrive app, the Nokia Drive app is wonderful and the whole experience is a worthy and very different alternate to iOS.

Except the music app. What. A. Mess. The inability to handle multi-disc albums (Beatles White Album, Floyd's The Wall etc) is incredible, especially as everything else - iTunes, iPhone, Sonos, Winamp etc can all handle the tags. All bar Windows 8 Music metro app and WP8 XBOX Music & Nokia Music.

Even if I sort The Wall into order in a playlist, there are still gaps between tracks. This was solved in the iPod world on my old 5th Gen iPod back in 2005/2006 - live albums and the like played without issue. 7 or 8 years on and a newer OS still struggles with this?!

Likewise why are albums by a single artist split into different albums on the phone when there are different composers for songs, despite them being tagged as the same artist?

I'm hoping the WIndows 8 music app fixes this as indicated in the Windows 8.1 announcement today "The Xbox Music app has been “completely redesigned”—you may recall the promised June/July update to the Xbox Music service—to make it easier to find and play music from your collection". If it does then hopefully the XBOX Music app in WP8 will follow suite.

Having got the 620 yesterday I was intending on heading out to get a micro SD card to host my music. However if I need to go through an exercise retagging the music I want to take with me again to satisfy the (undocumented?) quirks of XBM/NM then I'm tempted not to bother.

 

[Raghuvarya Chowdary]

best music player apps for windows phones 2013
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