I am fairly new to android here, just got the SGSII when it came out after being on an iPhone for years. I love the phone and the android system, there is just one thing I haven't been able to get working how I would like.
This is probably the one thing I miss from the iphone is how it kept media organized. There was one music player and one video player and there was no guessing with what formats would work. It either did or didn't. On android it has been WAYYYY more confusing. There are the stock players, and dozens of different ones people recommend to try and I don't seem to like any of them.
Is there anything similar to itunes that can help to manage and maintain all the music and other media on the device? I have an external SD card with a music and videos folder and right now just drag and drop onto there.
Also, most of my music's metadata is all jacked up and it seems like that's how most of the player apps organize everything. I tried to clean it up for several hours one night trying probably half a dozen different metadata programs and finally gave up.
So, does anyone have any help or suggestions as far as programs and apps to get media a little more organized with android?
Thanks
doubletwist. the android answer to itunes. or you can do google music....
Thanks. I was hesitant to try toubletwist at first, but now I'm glad I did. After trying winamp, mediamonkey, and several others this is much easier to use. Nice and simple and it seems to do videos well too. Too bad it just looks so much like itunes.
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Just wanted to share my experience with Ambling Book Player Pro.
For the longest time now I've been using PowerAmp. It's wonderful, it is by far the best music player available. Impressive EQ support, folder and playlist support, and a VERY clean and slick UI. Highly recommend it. That being said, when listening to an audiobook I always had to remember my place if I wanted to listen to music or say, flash a ROM 3 or 10 times a day. It got relatively annoying, so I went searching for an alternative. Everything I found was ok, but nothing was great.
I finally decided to give Ambling Book Player Pro a shot (since a lot of the books I listen to are .m4a and .mp3, and you need pro to load files from your SD card). It's wonderful. Support for .mp3, .ogg, .mp4, .wav, .wma*, .3gp, and .m4a. You can create as many bookmarks you want for each book and they save to the sdcard so you never lose your place. It has options for using the button on a headset as well, including play/pause and set bookmark. Another problem I have is that I listen to books all the time while doing other things and often find myself missing a section of the book, trying to skip back to hear what I missed was frustrating. The app has forward and back at 15 and 60 second intervals, which made tracing my steps very easy. It's not the prettiest interface, but it's so incredibly functional that I don't even care. Now I have PowerAmp for my music and ABPP for my audiobooks. If you find yourself in a situation at all like my own, give it a shot. Music and Audiobooks are, for me, one of my favorite things about smartphones.
Does it have speed control? I really utilize the ability of Astro Player to speed up audio books, it's nice because it doesn't increase the pitch (chipmunk), just the speed. I download with Audiobooks by Traveling Classics and listen to them with Astro Player. The combo is perfect I've found.
No it doesn't.
Not my cup of tea, it's nice to be forced to listen at a slow pace where I can really take my time imagining what I'm reading. Nonetheless it's a feature it lacks that you enjoy.
I use Audbilbe and their own player obviously. I love their app. I, however, like getting stuff for free so where do you go to find your audiobooks? If you are not allowed to post it (i don't know the specific rules for those things here) just send me a pm, thanks guys. I'll let you know after you hook me up how I feel about the Penguins!
Hi, Android n00b here. Looking at getting an Android tab -- wife has an iPad, I have an iPhone, but I am sick of the iOS walled garden.
A major thing that I want to use my tablet for is playing videos out to a projector, for shows that I do. It's important to me to be able to do these 2 things:
1. Play a playlist of videos in order, without further prompting once it starts.
2. Transition between videos cleanly and seamlessly -- no player controls or tablet home screen visible, even for a second. Nothing but black in between vids.
I've already got my mind pretty much made up about which tablet I'm getting... but I'm not ready to buy until I know there are apps that can meet those 2 requirements.
I've been told that the Dice, MX, and Mobo players will NOT do both of the things I'm looking for. I've gotten reports that Act1 can use playlists... but I haven't been able to find out anything about what the transitions between videos on a playlist look like.
Can anyone recommend a video player that has playlists, and transitions cleanly between videos?
UPDATE: I am hearing elsewhere that the Act 1 player may do everything I want. Haven't had a chance to try it out (since I don't have an Android device yet).
Thanks for the information.
I'm a bit of an audiophile and for me the music side of things really is lacking in Android. Its absolutely fine for example if you come home in the evening and want to listen to a few albums, its 110% no problems at all.
I listen to music on my phone 8-9 hours a day at work and its a let down.
Getting songs on it for a start is a nightmare, sure you can plunk all in a music folder again fine for listening to an odd album or whatever but there is no sort of organisation, Say I want a playlist with song 2 from album E followed by song 1 from album C and so on this is a nightmare to create on the phone, this is where iTunes comes into its element. Sure we have things like Doubletwist, on paper it should be fantastic, but the reality is it duplicates songs and playlist and isn't even smart enough to recognize duplicates in your library, there is also things like Winamp and its wireless syncing, it takes forever and again duplicates.
Then we have the problem with MP4 files, My Galaxy S2 can recognize many files but has issues with MP4 files, you get song name but artist info etc all unknown, it can't read the tags.
Then general sound levels, I've tried 3 android phones over the years and all 3 are to low, they are about 70% that of an iPhone and this is fine for general listening but if your fave song comes on you like a bit of a boost and well you can't, I also work in quite a noisy environment and machinery can he heard over the top of the phone on full, there are apps like Volume+ which claim can boost the volume and well they can but it distorts so all rather pointless.
Then there is finding a player, I've notice volume differs between them all, and some can't read the playlists you've created so in the end i;ve had to stick to stock player, although crap its the best of a bad bunch.
A feature I also liked on iTunes was Genius, I could pick a song say a rock song, hit a button and it would create a playlist similar, even if this was possible on android it wouldn't work anyway as all the MP4 tags are fooked.
So as I say I take music seriously and I suspect 90% of people won't care about these issues but I do and am hoping for some good advise as don't want to go back to iPhone but at the moments its looking like the only solution as Android is so frustrating to use for music.
First off, look at Voodoo sound control from the android market. It's often times included in custom ROMs. It will allow you to pump the volume up far beyond the stock ROM's capabilities. There's quite a few other tweaks it offers that I'm sure you'll find. The only catch with Voodoo is that it's only compatible with certain Kernels.
As for media playback, "Music" by Google is pretty powerful. It's not the same program that many phones run stock. It has support for FLAC playback, Song info lookup, even lyric support.
I recommend you take a look at PowerAmp. I am a music nut like you and it does everything and more! There is a full featured trial version and to buy it is only a few bucks. Check it out.
Sent from my DROID X2 using XDA App
I have to use music by G but I wish it has some more useful features like 'query' or 'play after this song' such.
There will probably never be a mobile player that will do Replay Gain on the fly so i suggest your grab yourself a copy of mp3gain for your PC. Plug your phone in via USB, drag and drop your music from phone to program interface, set level to 92db, Scan Tracks and then Apply Gain.
92db may be higher than some of your tracks already are and may be lower than others. Find a level that gives you the audio boost you need. As all tracks are set to the same level you won't have to adjust volume between tracks during playback.
There are plenty of players with Playlist support so that's covered. Try one of the ones mentioned above.
I think i've found the answer by accident, I was using Media Monkey I noticed it has a feature to analyze the volume of tracks, so I got them all analyzed and noticed most were in or around -10db, I hit level which brought them up to 0 to +5db and I have noticed a good improvement, It also sorted out all my tagging and artwork issues and even synced my playlists perfectly to my phone.
I'm of the old-school variety, and carry my music on my sdcard. When I first updated to the Google Music Beta app, it was all sorts of messed up, tag-wise. Looking through my tags, I realized how badly they were in disarray, with Google Music often considering two tracks to be on different albums if the only thing that differed was, say, the album art.
I realized how inconsistent my tags were, and decided to fix that issue. Over about two weeks I tidied up the tags in my MP3s, made cover art consistent, and so on. By the end of the process Google Music was reading everything correctly.
This last update, however, messed everything up again. Once again, about half of my albums are without cover art in the app, and about a third are split into multiple albums, with one or two tracks in one and the rest in the other. And, frankly, I can't figure out the issue. Every program I use to read the tags reports back the same thing; identical tags, except for track number and title. Album art is embedded into the files, and looking over it, the files I used were the exact same one, just replicated across all tracks in an album. I even checked to see if the issue was different versions of the MP3 tagging standard used in the same album, and it's not.
I tried clearing the data for Google Music, changing the name of the directory all my music is housed in, and even put a copy on my desktop PC. If I load the library into Clementine or Winamp, it reads the tags correctly with no duplicated albums or missing cover art.
I'm kinda running out of ideas here. Is there some special trick to getting Google Music happy with the way songs are tagged?
Im running it old school on my sd card. Theres really no need to stream tunes when everyone has a data cap
Sent from my MIUI.us Sensation 4G using XDA App
Please use the Q&A Forum for questions Thanks
Moving to Q&A
@lufc
Sorry about that, it's been a while since I've posted...completely glossed over the Q&A section. Thanks.
@vabeachfc3s
I'm...not sure what I'm supposed to take from that. I'm running from the sdcard as well.
Does anyone know if there is more extensive documentation on Music Square, or what application its based on? (If it is at all, since several features of the phone are heavily based on other widely available apps)
I've never been able to get it to work with anything but MP3s. Tried so far FLAC and M4A - both were recognised by the music player and play just fine, but Music square never detects them.
I just updated to LFB and it STILL doesn't work, which makes me wonder if its only supposed to support MP3, but its not very well documented by Samsung.
Anyone have either of these working?
FLAC is even weirder, because it will scan it and then when the file is already playing, and place it on the grid where it thinks it belongs, but it will never select that file to play in an automatic playlist.
As far as I can tell, Samsung had the algorithm lying around to sort music by mood from when they first released their iTunes-like media player, known as Emodio. They took this nearly forgotten technology, modified it into a square, then stuck it into their new music app. I have yet to find anyone who claims that Music Square works for anything other than mp3s.
Pointless816 said:
As far as I can tell, Samsung had the algorithm lying around to sort music by mood from when they first released their iTunes-like media player, known as Emodio. They took this nearly forgotten technology, modified it into a square, then stuck it into their new music app. I have yet to find anyone who claims that Music Square works for anything other than mp3s.
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It would be helpful if they at least said it somewhere.
I got a reply to an email I sent them today, saying just as much, and suggesting that I just use MP3. That's not ideal, and how would I even know to use MP3 in the first place since it doesn't say anywhere it only works with it?
Like I said though, FLAC half-works. It knows what category it falls into but it just doesn't ever put them in a list. Vorbis could be the same for all I know (or maybe it actually works).