Music is an incredibly important part of my life. I carry a ton of music with me. So much, in fact, that it can be downright overwhelming. Without a good music player/manager, I’d be lost trying to move from one track or another. So, when I found Poweramp, I was greatly relieved.
Let’s start here. Poweramp has an incredibly useful gesture-based player screen. Swipe to the right/left and PA will go to the previous/next track. Swipe down/up and it will go to the previous/next album. No searching. No navigating. No nonsense. Additionally, the player screen has all the buttons you’ve come to expect in a competant music app: previous/next album, previous/next song, play/pause, track/album repeat, shuffle, equalizer, tone/volume, and library buttons in addition to displaying the album art.
Everything is laid out cleanly and is completely customizable. Jumping from player to playlist to equalizer to whatever is extremely easy. Rarely do I find myself exiting out of the app accidentally like I do with a few other music players.
The equalizer reminds me of the simplicity of Winamp for Windows which I used so long ago. It’s a 10-band graphic equalizer with preamp that comes with about 15 presets and lets you change them as necessary. You’re also given bass/treble knobs and control over tone/volume.
My favorite thing about Poweramp is the list of files it plays: mp3, mp4/m4a (including alac), ogg, wma, flac, wav, ape, wv, tta, mpc, and aiff. All of my music was once encoded to MP3 @160kbps, then I decided on OGG/Vorbis, and now I do everything in FLAC, so it’s nice to have a player that will handle a couple formats without missing a beat.
Finding songs is just plain simple in Poweramp. It has a library that organizes items by Artist, Album, Playlist, Genre, etc. A couple taps and you’re playing the songs you want without any hassle.
There are a few other things that are just plain nice to have. It can search the web to give you all the album art for all your albums. Occasionally, it will get some wrong, but gives you the option to change them. Find this in Menu > Settings > Album Art > Download Album Art
How many times have you listened to a song and thought, “What is he saying here?” Well, now, you can find out. PA can provide the lyrics to songs via the musiXmatch lyrics plugin. It’s easy enough to do that I’ve used this while running on the treadmill.
For those songs that aren’t quite labled right, PA can take care of those. Track tag editing is a present feature that makes life a little easier – Sure beats having to edit the track on your PC and resync the track to your phone.
One downside to the application. I’ve found no way to integrate with Google Music. One user online suggested to point Poweramp in the direction of Google Music’s tracks, but I was unable to. Gmusic’s tracks are all held in /data/data/com.google.android.music/files, but there is no way to reach the directory. Poweramp will only access the internal and external memory.
Wrap Up
A player with a really well-designed interface that is skinnable, and gives you total control over your music is hard to come by. One that does this and handles so many different formats and has so many plugins is downright impossible. There are so many additional settings in Poweramp that I’ll never be able to fully cover them. You’ll just have to try it out for yourself.
PowerAMP by Max MP
Version:
Price: Free:, ProUnlocker: $3.99
Pros:
- Plays everything
- Clean interface
- Gesture controls
- Volume button track control
- Themable
Cons:
- No google music integration
Bottom Line: Get it! Full control over your music with a clean interface.
You can take a screenshot, import it into your favorite picture editing app, then edit and save it. OR, you could use Ink Over Apps. It’s a simple application that runs in your notification bar. You select “Show” when you want to see it and “Hide” when you don’t. The app on launch adds itself to the notification bar and brings up a small toolbar on top of whatever app you’re running. The four buttons are simple in function:
Min – hides the toolbar so you can see everything you want to screenshot. A simple touch on the screen brings it back.
Like any browser, Dolphin has the usual stuff like tabs, pinch/tap to zoom, and an address bar, but it’s real strength lies in bookmark and add-on availablility. For this reason, Dolphin is my browser of choice. From any tab, swipe from the left edge of the screen to find all your bookmarks . A quick swipe from the right edge of the screen will bring out a list of plug-ins. There’s a lot of them available in the Play Store, so chances are, you’ll be able to find one that suits your needs.
Gestures lets you draw on the screen to go to a site or to navigate in your tab. For example, drawing a “G” would send you to Google.com, an “f” would send you to Facebook, a “<” would take you back a page, “>” forward, etc. There is a list of predefined gesture shortcuts, and of course, you can create your own.
