What Music Player Are You Using (For WP/W10M)?

[Ariel Takom]

Hello WC members! So, I tried searching for posts like mine, but not much replies were given to them. So I decided to ask this question to all of you again, but bear in mind that this question is centered around WP/W10M users, but users of other OSes are welcome to comment as well

So, let me start by saying that I'm a Lumia 830 user from Malaysia, some small country in South-East Asia. Therefore I have no access to Xbox Music/ Groove Music pass and whatnot. Of course I'd still be able to use the default Music app, but it felt like the app was a 'stripped-down' version of what users with access to Xbox/Groove Music Pass are using. Also, the default music app's performance (app opening, album caching, etc) made me dislike it, and I can only hope for further improvements on this from Microsoft. Btw, I'm still using WP8.1 (haven't upgraded, waiting for the official public release) so I haven't tried Groove Music for W10M. Watched some videos in YouTube about the app, and so far am impressed, but until I can use it for myself, I will try to look for an alternate music player for my phone.

Throughout my journey of finding the 'perfect music player' for WP, I have tried countless of music player apps and, so far, none really caught my attention. So I was wondering if there was a hidden gem of a music player lurking somewhere in the Windows Store and is being used by any of you.

Just wanted to add that most of my music are stored locally. The data speed in my country isn't really fast for streaming music from OneDrive and whatnot, not to mention the expensive costs of purchasing top-ups for my data.

I'll share on the apps that I've used so far (I even paid for some of them!):

(1) MusicPro
- This app is the one I'm currently using. Performance-wise, it launches quite fast (about 1 second of splash screen), and I really love the 'Play My Library' function as it immediately plays a random song from my phone (I'm not really a playlist kind of guy. Got no time to arrange my songs), as well as the auto-playlist feature. When initializing the app from a fresh install, the app scans the music quite fast, but that depends on how you store your music files (apparently, syncing my music to my phone through Windows Media Player made all my music to be stored in individual folders according to Artists>Album>Song order. So the app was really slowed down by this). It also has a live tile function that shows the album art of the track currently playing. It also has a neat feature called 'Stop the music' that clears out the music from the volume bar.
- The downside to this app is that, everytime you add a new song to your phone, you will have to re-scan the entire library of music on your phone, which is kind of time-consuming and very annoying. The 'Now Playing' screens displays the album art of the track very largely (about half the screen), and there's no toggle for scrolling through the song, so it's hard to skip through a certain part of a song.
- I bought this app just to show support. It added some additional features but I kind of forgotten what it was lol.

(2) Modern Music
- Great interface with album art showing with an 'appropriate size', somehow the UI is more 'pleasant to the eyes' compared to that of MusicPro. Scans for music at a much faster rate than MusicPro, but haven't tried adding a new song to the phone after the initial scan, so I can't confirm if this app faces the same problem as MusicPro. Decent customizability. Also features Last.fm scrobbling.
- What made me chose MusicPro over this app is the fact that, when I tried logging in to my Last.fm account, the app crashed. So I soft-reset my phone and waited for a few days to let the app 'settle-in'. Tried again, and the same thing happened. I didn't buy this app so I didn't consider approaching the dev for solutions (too lazy lol). Also, the in-app performance seems to lag behind MusicPro at certain instances, albeit it doesn't really affect the overall performance of the app itself.
- Apparently it has a lot more, and a much better rating/reviews than MusicPro.

(3) Extreme Music
-This app is one of the best music player I came across simply because it's really fast (library scanning took half the time it takes for MusicPro/Modern Music), and launching the app is so fast, it's almost as fast as pulling down the action centre (okay, maybe that's too much. But it really is fast!) In-app performance is top-notch... okay, I'm really just talking about the performance here lol. So TL;DR: Best performance amongst other Music Playing app. Also, Extreme Music offers to fill-in the missing album arts of your songs automatically, as well as a built-in tag editor which is a pretty nifty feature for people with un-organized music library (like me. :v ). It also provides other useful features such as a driving mode, social media integration #np , timer, and much much more. Last.fm scrobbling is also supported.
- The only reason why I didn't use this app is because of the 'Now Playing' interface that somehow feels too small/cluttered for me. I have fat fingers, and find myself pressing something I didn't intend to while using the app. At first I could manage it, but after some time, I was annoyed by it, so I decided that enough is enough lol.

(4) OneMusic
- Simple interface (launches immediately to your song list, can be adjusted to open the app directly to album/genre/artist list). Decent performance. Easy to create playlists.
- I actually preferred this app over the others (before I found MusicPro), and even decided to purchase it. After the purchase, the app's performance deteriorated to the point it was lagging very badly that I had to uninstall it. Not sure if this issue had been fixed or not.

(5) Loco Music Player
- This is the only app to beat Extreme Music in terms of scanning your music library. Right after installing the app, you're not required to scan your music library. IT DOES THAT FOR YOU AUTOMATICALLY after you go into the 'Add A Song'. The app scans for music BLAZING FAST, and if this has caused some performance issues to your device, you can adjust the setting to 'Manual Scan Only'. The interface is really intuitive, and that spinning logo at the top left is a good animator, which also serves as a shortcut to your other music. The customizability of the app is really good, as you can choose the theme that matches your taste (I personally like the Windows 10 theme).
- The downside of this player is the fact that it is a playlist-based music player. Unfortunately for me, I'm not a playlist kind of guy, so this app doesn't really suit me (the good side about this playlist thing FOR ME is that it is the only one that actually automatically creates a playlist from my recently added songs. MusicPro has this feature, but it is somewhat broken as it actually suggests 600 out of 618 of my songs are recently added). Also, as much as I like the various preset themes offered, they're still just that: presets. You can't create your custom theme apart from changing to the theme based on your phone's accent colour.

(6) Listen
- Simple and smooth app. Love the animations/visualizations and the lyrics feature of the app. Also love the fact that just by clicking play, the player will play my whole library.
- The way the app shows the lyrics of the currently playing song is somewhat obtrusive, in a sense that it made the clean and simple interface of the app look so cluttered. Also, the app experiences hiccups and crashes every now and then, rendering the app unusable for a period of time (not sure if this issue is addressed or not). Also, there isn't much that you could change in the settings, like turning off the lyrics (the only way to turn it off is to ensure that you turn off your mobile data and WiFi connection). Now I'm not really sure about this, but I don't think you can create playlists with the app.

(7) Perfect Music
- Great UI and Gesture Control. Really love the spinning disc interface. Provides an ample amount of theme for the design of the disc (the disc acts as album art display. If there's no album art for a particular track, it will display textures as per chosen theme i.e. the Sharingan from the Uchihas in Naruto).
- Bad performance especially when switching songs. After some time, the overall performance of the deteriorates (and I noticed this is only after a day of use). Sometime the gesture control doesn't work (your touch is not detected).

(8) SonicXbeat
- Great UI concept and lots of gesture controls, all customizable via settings.
- Bad performance. Opening the app was fast, but the in-app navigation and usage of gesture controls were somewhat laggy. Not sure if it has been updated or not, but the few hours I spent with it left a bad taste in my mouth. There is a potential for the app though as the gesture control is pretty good, but somehow the enormous amount of gesture control may have been too taxing on my L830, thus the drop in performance.

(9) Core Music Player
- Great performance and minimalistic UI.
- The app plays music via folders. Unfortunately my music was synced to my phone and stored in separate folders (refer to MusicPro above). It may be great for some people who arrange organize their music via folder, but this just wasn't for me.
- Got it for free via myAppfree.

So that brings me the end to the music apps I've used. Do share what music player you folks are using, and if you feel like sharing your thoughts on any of the apps I've mentioned above i.e. "the app is better after the update" etc, do tell me so I can go back and check them out.

 

[v535]

I use mixradio.

 

[anon(9275303)]

Try Aki Music Player. Very new app, but available on both desktop and mobile, with new features to be added.. Very Zune-like in UI and appearance. Successfully scanned my 4000+ tracks and downloaded correct album & artist artwork in a few minutes time. Performance has been good so far. I really like it. Perfect Music, Loco, and Groove are the ones I have on my phone and that I alternate between normally. Aki could easily displace them as my favorite if the promised new features are added.

 

[Ariel Takom]

I use mixradio.

Yeah I use that too, but only for streaming purposes, or when I want to find new music (I either use MixRadio or Spotify for this). Loved the fact that MixRadio is able to play my local music files, and scans them fairly quickly and detects their correct album art, hence why I prefer this app over Spotify. However, the lack of music searching feature and being forced to see the artist image as background became a deal-breaker for me. Besides, the UI seems aged when used with W10M, and I think an update or refresh to the UI, as well as adding additional features for the app is much needed now. As it is, the app is great. With constant updates, it would only become better.

 

[Ariel Takom]

Try Aki Music Player. Very new app, but available on both desktop and mobile, with new features to be added.. Very Zune-like in UI and appearance. Successfully scanned my 4000+ tracks and downloaded correct album & artist artwork in a few minutes time. Performance has been good so far. I really like it. Perfect Music, Loco, and Groove are the ones I have on my phone and that I alternate between normally. Aki could easily displace them as my favorite if the promised new features are added.

Thanks for the info! Just searched for it in the store, and planning to try it out soon (I want to try Groove Music for now, just updated to W10M). Before I use the app, I have questions regarding the app:
1) When you say "downloaded correct album & artist artwork", does it mean that the app does this automatically like Extreme Music?
2) How is the performance compared to Loco Music?
3) Is the trial version permanent with ads, or must we purchase the app to continue using it?
4) This has suddenly became a feature that I really need: Does it support FLAC? I know Groove supports it brilliantly, along with that Gapless Playback feature.
5) How long does it take to scan your music library in your phone? And is the scanning automatic (like Groove and Loco) or manual (like Perfect Music)?

And I'm so sorry if I'm asking too much. Just wanted to know more about the app before I try it out myself

 

[dKp1977]

I don't have a Music Pass subscription either, but I'm perfectly fine with Groove. In fact, it's the best audio player I've seen and used so far on any OS. It even blows good ol' Zune out of the water.

 

[sulistyarso]

Quickplay, core player

 

[Ariel Takom]

I don't have a Music Pass subscription either, but I'm perfectly fine with Groove. In fact, it's the best audio player I've seen and used so far on any OS. It even blows good ol' Zune out of the water.

I actually agree to what you've said, but only until just now. In these past few days, I've been trying to organize my music library as most of them have the wrong metadata and with no embeded album artwork, they looked ugly. Since I'm having some free time now due to Christmas, I've decided to organize my music library on my pc, before transferring them to my phone. Long story short, doing this took a lot of time, effort, and patience. When I finally finished editing all of it, I transferred the newly organized musics of mine into my phone and deleting the old, unorganized ones.

Groove did not detect most of the artwork, and it even detected the wrong artwork for an album (like when I open album A, Groove displays the artwork of album B). And since Groove had no way of manually re-scanning the files, I had to endure this visual torture until I gave up.

At first, I thought it was just a problem in my editing. But other music apps (Aki, MixRadio) and even in the File Explorer itself was able to detect the correct artwork of each file!

And so ends my rant.

 

[Ariel Takom]

Quickplay, core player

I used to use Quickplay, but found the app's lagginess too much, and the lack of updates to address this issue forced me to give up using it.

How is the app doing now? Is it better? Has it been updated to support W10M?

 

[dKp1977]

I actually agree to what you've said, but only until just now. In these past few days, I've been trying to organize my music library as most of them have the wrong metadata and with no embeded album artwork, they looked ugly. Since I'm having some free time now due to Christmas, I've decided to organize my music library on my pc, before transferring them to my phone. Long story short, doing this took a lot of time, effort, and patience. When I finally finished editing all of it, I transferred the newly organized musics of mine into my phone and deleting the old, unorganized ones.

Groove did not detect most of the artwork, and it even detected the wrong artwork for an album (like when I open album A, Groove displays the artwork of album B). And since Groove had no way of manually re-scanning the files, I had to endure this visual torture until I gave up.

At first, I thought it was just a problem in my editing. But other music apps (Aki, MixRadio) and even in the File Explorer itself was able to detect the correct artwork of each file!

And so ends my rant.

Working quite fine for me. All my files have approriate ID3 tags and embedded music art. All of them show up in Groove. The only thing that's not always working is artist artwork, which Groove pulls from its music database (you know, those images shown when playing a song). It's working for most of the bands for me, but not for less common ones.
Nevertheless, for me having artist wallpapers and/or album covers isn't exactly what makes a music app good or bad. It's how easy it is to navigate through it, create playlists on the fly, check which songs are up next, cycle through songs and so on.. Groove handles these things rather great. Especially when compared to Xbox Music in WP8(.1).
I've tried a lot of music players back in the WP days, but none came even close to what Groove is. That's my personal opinion though.

 

[sulistyarso]

I used to use Quickplay, but found the app's lagginess too much, and the lack of updates to address this issue forced me to give up using it.

How is the app doing now? Is it better? Has it been updated to support W10M?

Still the same, but better than grove, i got freezing screen when using it on my lumia 720. Not found universal apps yet

 

[anon(9275303)]

Thanks for the info! Just searched for it in the store, and planning to try it out soon (I want to try Groove Music for now, just updated to W10M). Before I use the app, I have questions regarding the app:
1) When you say "downloaded correct album & artist artwork", does it mean that the app does this automatically like Extreme Music?
2) How is the performance compared to Loco Music?
3) Is the trial version permanent with ads, or must we purchase the app to continue using it?
4) This has suddenly became a feature that I really need: Does it support FLAC? I know Groove supports it brilliantly, along with that Gapless Playback feature.
5) How long does it take to scan your music library in your phone? And is the scanning automatic (like Groove and Loco) or manual (like Perfect Music)?

And I'm so sorry if I'm asking too much. Just wanted to know more about the app before I try it out myself

1) Yes, Aki does it automatically.

2) Comparable in performance. I don't notice much difference between in performance between them.

3)Don't know. Description in store says Aki has full functionalities for 7 days during trial. I purchased the app on my second day of trial since I liked it so much.

4) Flac support and gapless playback are listed as features that will be added in a coming update along with Groove and OneDrive integration.

5) Scanning of songs and downloading of album and artist artwork was automatic. It took a few minutes to scan 4000 songs and a slightly longer time, 10-15 minutes, to download the artwork.

 

[Ariel Takom]

1) Yes, Aki does it automatically.

2) Comparable in performance. I don't notice much difference between in performance between them.

3)Don't know. Description in store says Aki has full functionalities for 7 days during trial. I purchased the app on my second day of trial since I liked it so much.

4) Flac support and gapless playback are listed as features that will be added in a coming update along with Groove and OneDrive integration.

5) Scanning of songs and downloading of album and artist artwork was automatic. It took a few minutes to scan 4000 songs and a slightly longer time, 10-15 minutes, to download the artwork.

I see. I tested the app just now, and I notice that while it id quite nice, the performance was somewhat a biiiiit slower than loco. The layout is nice though. But since its a paid app, I'm still holding out because I've personally bought quite a lot of music apps, and none of them managed to make me stay using them.

Also, since you say it scanned 4k+ of your songs and downloaded the appropriate artworks for you, I wanted to know if Aki completely replaces the current artwork of my mp3s? I've actually manually edited and embed the appropriate album artwork into most of my mp3s, so the idea of Aki replacing the artwork that I had spent time editing myself is quite... Well.. Frustrating. XD

 

[amitnahar]

Here are some which you have not tried yet.
Zbox
Music Mode
N7 Music Player

 

[Ariel Takom]

Here are some which you have not tried yet.
Zbox
Music Mode
N7 Music Player

I've actually tried Zbox before, and tbh when I first tried Aki Music Player I immediately thought that it is almost similar to Zbox lol. What kept me from using both is the fact that I'm not sure if they will replace the album arts on my mp3 (I've embeded all the artworks of my music files manually, and the thought of all those hard work being erased scares me lol).

Also, for Music Mode, have you used it? The moment I saw it in store I was a bit hesitant on using it since it looked like a fake music app lol.

 

[amitnahar]

I've actually tried Zbox before, and tbh when I first tried Aki Music Player I immediately thought that it is almost similar to Zbox lol. What kept me from using both is the fact that I'm not sure if they will replace the album arts on my mp3 (I've embeded all the artworks of my music files manually, and the thought of all those hard work being erased scares me lol).

Also, for Music Mode, have you used it? The moment I saw it in store I was a bit hesitant on using it since it looked like a fake music app lol.

Well. Music Mode is the app which I am using currently. I prefer it to any other app. The developer is very responsive and implements features really fast. Try it.

 

[Ariel Takom]

Well. Music Mode is the app which I am using currently. I prefer it to any other app. The developer is very responsive and implements features really fast. Try it.

Alright, will give it a go later. Am busy now prepping for Christmas xD
Btw, does the app support FLAC? And is it a free app, free trial with ads, or a paid app?

 

[sakthivignesh]

N7 music player

 

[amitnahar]

Alright, will give it a go later. Am busy now prepping for Christmas xD
Btw, does the app support FLAC? And is it a free app, free trial with ads, or a paid app?

It's a free app. No ads but some features are there in Pro only. You can try pro features for free first 30 days.

 

[justonlumia]

Listen works great for me, everything in my iTunes library came in exactly and no scanning time is the best