[Q] Best FREE music player for 2.3? - Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

I've used a few media players, and they all come up short somehow. So, I'm wondering if we can get an ongoing discussion of people's favorite music players.
FREE only, I don't care if PowerAmp is the best, I'm not dropping five bucks when there are decent free options. And there are decent free options if we look. Supporting developers is cool, but we chose an open platform to have choices, not to be shoehorned into a one-size-fits-some solution. Also, we know PowerAmp, PlayerPro, and DoubleTwist Premium are the best. There's no need for a lively conversation about the best paid music app. Just pick one of those and you're okay.
Amazon MP3. First non-stock media player I stuck with for any amount of time. Decent player but kind of barebones. Nice if you have music in Amazon's cloud (I do).
MIUI player. Found on XDA somewhere. Decent, but ugly (black and white). Had something else wrong with it, I forget what.
Cloudskipper. Has an EQ, but lives up to its name -- for some reason, it skips, like your phone all of a sudden has moving parts. Imagine a first-generation CD player in a truck that's gone mudding and you wouldn't be far off. Also, it purges its playlists every so often (every time new music is added to the memory card, I think).
Songbird. Currently using this. So far it's alright. Open source, so there's that.
Basically, I need the player to let me make a playlist and shuffle it. That's my core requirement. I don't want all the music on my phone in the mix, just most of it. Eventually I will make various "channels" like hard/fast and soft/slow, maybe a country-only playlist, etc., but for now it's just "Favorites". Wouldn't mind an EQ but it's not necessary. And it's got to display the metadata. I spend an ungodly amount of time getting that right. Album art, artist/band, album, title at least. Year and genre optional.
P.S.: Why do so many players make it so easy to accidentally set a song as a ringtone? Do they get paid every time you do this or something? (Yes, I know that sounds stupid.) Who wants a whole song, not just a 30 second clip of one, as a ringtone? If it's got an awesome intro ("Joker and the Thief" by Wolfmother springs to mind) maybe, but still, wouldn't you wanna crop it down first?

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Try doubletwist ® player,
It's got iPod functions, for free!
Samsung Galaxy Gio
CM 7.2 20120325 (thanks 2 phiezx)
XDA Premium
Dont say 'thanks', just press the button

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DoubleTwist is not free. There is a free version, but it is heavily crippled. It used to only charge extra for syncing, now it says you have to pay to see album covers, even the ones embedded in the file (though, it offered to let me see three for free!). What a crock. I actually tried it earlier today and was disgusted by how far DT has fallen. It used to be a good app.
I'm only interested in FREE music players. The old DoubleTwist would have been fine as the Pro feature is not one I need. But metadata support is a requirement, as I said. And if it has an EQ, that has to be on the free side -- another feature DT wants you to pay for.

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Just for the record, poweramp is not the best,
(it's extremely quiet, voodoo louder has no effect on it, the gui is terrible, it lacks many useful features, and so much more)
Anyhoo, try Xplayer, it doesn't have all the features you might want, but the music quality is level with PlayerPro, the gui is pretty, but as I said, it lacks a few needed features.
You may also want to try;
N7P
Rocket Music Player
P.s. Check your inbox.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA

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If you say MIUI player is ugly, there are a lot of themed ones. You can try UberMusic, a WP7 style. I personally use Xperia S music ported, see if that works for you

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UberMusic and N7Player are not free..!
Curious about the Sony one. I used their launcher briefly. It was nice but light on the options.
I didn't know the MIUI player had themes. It was just black and white. I'm trying to remember what my problem with it was, because I loved it at first. I think it just had "favorites" of its own, songs in my Favorites playlist that it would play daily, and that playlist had 150+ songs. So even though my commute is half an hour, there is no excuse for it to play the same 2-4 songs every time. That isn't what shuffle is, it needs to be totally random.
XPlay is pretty ugly, but it says it has themes. I gotta hand it to 'em, they could have gone with black and grey like everybody else, but they went with orange on light grey. It's a bold choice. I might have to check it out to see what else they did differently. (Also, I'm old enough to remember when the cool electronics were silver, before they were white and beige, which is before black. 70s/80s, 90s, and 00s/10s respectively.)
Also: We have a spoiler tag? Learn something new every day.

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Dark Reality said:
UberMusic and N7Player are not free..!
Curious about the Sony one. I used their launcher briefly. It was nice but light on the options.
I didn't know the MIUI player had themes. It was just black and white. I'm trying to remember what my problem with it was, because I loved it at first. I think it just had "favorites" of its own, songs in my Favorites playlist that it would play daily, and that playlist had 150+ songs. So even though my commute is half an hour, there is no excuse for it to play the same 2-4 songs every time. That isn't what shuffle is, it needs to be totally random.
XPlay is pretty ugly, but it says it has themes. I gotta hand it to 'em, they could have gone with black and grey like everybody else, but they went with orange on light grey. It's a bold choice. I might have to check it out to see what else they did differently. (Also, I'm old enough to remember when the cool electronics were silver, before they were white and beige, which is before black. 70s/80s, 90s, and 00s/10s respectively.)
Also: We have a spoiler tag? Learn something new every day.
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Just get PlayerPro. I doubt at this rate you'll find a free music player that you like.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA

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Moodagent is very good and it's free.
I like "cubed" too. (In Google play appears as a "3")

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HeXmit said:
Moodagent is very good and it's free.
I like "cubed" too. (In Google play appears as a "3")
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I was going to recommend cubed too. It's pretty decent. My only real complaint would be the lock screen controls don't seem to work perfectly for me (I press the lock button and my normal lock screen appears, then disappears, then I have to press it again to get the lock screen controls to show). But that may just be my phone.
It's certainly a nice player.

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I think that the best music player and 100% free is Stock android player + beats audio* + xloud* and maybe any equaliser - but xperia s stock player has equaliser so i cant give any examples of good ones.
*both are ported for android 2.3, just look for thread and zip file to flash

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SifJar said:
I was going to recommend cubed too. It's pretty decent. My only real complaint would be the lock screen controls don't seem to work perfectly for me (I press the lock button and my normal lock screen appears, then disappears, then I have to press it again to get the lock screen controls to show). But that may just be my phone.
It's certainly a nice player.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You're right, but we shouldn't forget that is "beta"

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I forget what I didn't like about cubed. I'll have to try it again.
And I resent the implication that pirating a paid app is a valid solution to being dissatisfied with a couple free apps. There are so many free choices.
Sent from my Motorola Electrify using Tapatalk

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Never mind, cubed is cool. It doesn't have the playlist support I want but it will be cool on a road trip to quickly queue songs when we don't want a dumb playlist to pick for us. Thanks for that recommendation.
Sent from my Motorola Electrify using Tapatalk