Musicolet – Offline Music Player for Android | Hacker News Reader

Musicolet – Offline Music Player for Android

krosbits.in

93 pointsLammy72 comments

When Google Play Music shut down I decided to buy a 128gb SD card and a Jelly Pro (tiny phone) to use as an MP3 player.

The battery life on the phone is shit, but since I only needed it for music, I could do something about that. I rooted it, added some automation: automatically launch music player and scrobbler on startup, activate airplane mode except when plugged in, add sshd service so I can rsync files to it, and turn the device off if music issn't playing for three consecutive checks (each 15m apart)

The only thing I need was a decent music player. I tried Musicolet, but it didn't suit me. For a start, it just doesn't work well on a small screen. Almost every piece of text was truncated. I also found that it didn't pick up media changes a lot of the time (eg sync a new playlist). I ended up going with phonograph because it's perfect on a small screen, has good controls and is really simple.

It now has the option to avoid (laggy) Android media service framework, and to use its own scanner to detect media changes instead. That should be immediate.

Honest question, why kit just get a DAP like one of the Higby, FiiO, Shanking, or Xduoo devices?

I got a DAP. The Shanling Q1. Sounds great and is an absolutely beautiful device. But it's heavy, and has the worst interface I've ever used on any music player. It's fucking awful. So it sits in a box on the shelf and I'll only ever take it out to show people how it's possible to get 90% of the way to brilliance and then totally shit the bed.

I recommend RockBox on a Sandisk Sansa Clip+. Goes to 11 on brilliance.

For years I used Sansa clip with RockBox. That was also the last player my wife used. But it's getting insanely expensive to replace them now, an it's essentially a dead technology. I did a massive search for RockBox compatible players before going the Jelly Pro route, but I didn't find anything recent. It felt like fighting against the tide. Way easier to use an Android app.

try odyssey

It's much easier to not try odyssey than to try odyssey (on a 2 word recommendation)

That's cool, I tried phonograph (on a 0 word recommendation) and it's basically the exact same UI as odyssey.

Try DSub and your own airsonic music server. Optionally open up cached files in foobar2k instead.

The version of DSub on F-Droid is unfortunately years out of date since the dev had to pull in some Google library for Chromecast support.

There's Ultrasonic (Subsonic client), MALP (MPD client) and Squeezer (LMS client) on Fdroid that are still active. Also Dsub might still work.

https://f-droid.org/packages/org.moire.ultrasonic/

https://f-droid.org/packages/org.gateshipone.malp/

https://f-droid.org/packages/uk.org.ngo.squeezer/

Also checkout Ampache. They support Subsonic android app after enabling some setting. Ampache has been going strong since 2001.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampache

Also checkout MPD (Music Player Daemon) and Logitech Media Server (LMS). All are FLOSS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Player_Daemon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logitech_Media_Server

That last fully FOSS DSub build does still work with my Airsonic server, yeah. Sorry my wording implied otherwise. It’s just out of date compared to the version you’d find on Google Play is all, but my phone is old too so I don’t mind :)

That's something I might do, but for music on the go, running a server somewhere is a huge amount of extra setup. It's also something i need to connect to. The battery saving from not running wifi/4g is huge. It's also one more thing that can break

Airsonic lets you precache albums with ease. It's really more of a wireless music management software which you only need to run when you want. Music is cached in a readable folder which any music app can pick up.

> add sshd service so I can rsync files to it,

Google Play Music, apart from being a good local music player it's sync feature seemed to have been much sought after. With the app's removal, the local playback is addressed by apps like Musicolet but there is a need gap[1] for syncing local library and addressing it would be a great way to monetize such music player apps or perhaps even build a new one to address it?

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/179-upload-local-music-and-sync... (Disclaimer: I built this problem validation platform).

I just point my player app to a folder that syncthing manages.

That's the simplest way to do it, But it's still beyond the capacity of many as there are those who have local cache of digital songs from the 2000s in their memory cards, have a phone and the tablet; But don't know how to sync that across devices.

There are fewer apps designed for small phones. For my 4.6" phone with a large UI scale, I found foobar2000[1] very functional. It truncates even less than Phonograph and has high contrast themes.

[1]]http://foobar2000.com/get-android

Musicolet is one of those no-nonsense and polished android applications that are becoming more and more rare these days.

The interface is really clean, the app has many useful features and honestly, the whole UX is smooth and intuitive. I'll go as far as to say I've never seen a music player software on Windows or GNU/Linux that is as well-crafted as this. (Clementine[1] comes close but sadly it seems it's not maintained anymore).

If you've used Xperia phones, it is similar to the Walkman music player [2].

[1] https://www.clementine-player.org/

[2] https://www.gizmobolt.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Sony-Wa...

> Musicolet is one of those no-nonsense and polished android applications that are becoming more and more rare these days.

Is its source are open already?

It is closed source, but if privacy is your concern, it does not attempt to access the internet. You can log connections to check this or just inspect the list of permissions it uses in Android settings.

> If you've used Xperia phones, it is similar to the Walkman music player

In the age of Symbian, TTPod was a "Walkman music player" for Symbian.[0,1,2]

[0] http://nyess-symbian.blogspot.com/2011/10/ttpod-music-player...

[1] http://www.freeware-symbian.com/ttpod-download-5869.html

[2] https://seclub.org/dn.php?d=5&r=1&c=32&fd=5435

>I'll go as far as to say I've never seen a music player software on Windows or GNU/Linux that is as well-crafted as this

Media monkey is the best player ever. It's autodj feature virtually eliminates the need to create playlists. Think I should make a YouTube tutorial on configuring it.

It looks like Clementine is being actively developed again, but there are no new stable releases yet.

https://github.com/clementine-player/Clementine

It was also forked as “Strawberry” a couple years ago: https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/

> The interface is really clean, the app has many useful features and honestly, the whole UX is smooth and intuitive.

It is smooth, but I disagree with clean/intuitive. I just installed it for the first time and the comments I have:

- The first screen (now playing?) has a big "Musicolet" branded square filling most of the screen (where missing album art would go), and a small "Musicolet" fuzzed out in the background behind the tiny media controls. I can't find any way to adjust the size of these media controls, though I did manage to change it so tapping on the album art will play/pause a song, so not the end of the world. But immediately puts to rest the claim of it being clean/intuitive/well-polished in my opinion.

- The tab to the left of that seems to be a queue - filled with my library on random? Seems fine.

- The tab to the right is library view. I keep mine well organize, so that will be handy.

- The fourth tab (dot in a circle in a circle?) looks like album list. Change to list view, that's better. Lots of different sorting options - great! I want it sorted by date but wait.. now it doesn't show me artist? maybe I can change the settings ... nope, I can either show album-artist, or album-year, but not album-year/artist. There's lots of white space on the second line, showing both year and artist would've made this tab useful.

- 5th tab, artist - duplicate of library view in my case.

- 6th tab - label/genre, useless as I don't manage this tag on my files

- 7th tab - i don't know what this is

- 8th tab - search, oops this isn't a tab. the button is tab sized, but I can't swipe to it like a tab. Larger button would help.

- 9th (not a tab) - settings. Go to change interface - oh I guess the 7th tab was playlists, and despite it not looking useful to me I can't push it below the line to hide it.

> I'll go as far as to say I've never seen a music player software on Windows or GNU/Linux that is as well-crafted as this. (Clementine[1] comes close but sadly it seems it's not maintained anymore).

I think Foober2000 on windows is at least as well-crafted as this (and looks similar to the shots of Clementine on that page).

I currently use foobar2000 on android. It also has significant shortcomings, but I will likely continue to use it. But musicolet looks promising so I'll keep my eye on it and see how it develops (foobar mobile has seemed unchanging since I first installed it 3 years ago).

> I can't find any way to adjust the size of these media controls

I don't think there is any app which allows you to do so. Still the settings dialog has lots of options (more than alternatives). I've heavily customized (minimized) Musicolet one time. Now I only have 5 tabs which I use the first 3 (playlists, now playing and folder-view).

The most important features for me is "search in queue" in playlist view itself (the narrow bar below). Also it is nice that it auto-generates the "most-played musics" in a separate playlist with counts of each item beside.

Maybe the default settings and layouts is not clutter-free but at least it allows the user to de-bloat and customize to his liking.

I guess it's not that I expect the "play" button size to be adjustable, rather I think it should be prioritized (larger) than other buttons. The play button is the same size as each of the three shuffle option buttons.

After spending a while removing stuff (blurred album art in the background particularly, plus a few tabs, and unnecessary options) I like the interface more. Was getting a bit of stuttering on bluetooth when driving earlier, hopefully that stops.

I think what I like most is that I can adjust id3 tags etc in-app, for multiple files at the same time - it feels like a real computer program, instead of more typical cell phone crapware.

I use this. But I have yet to find a way to cast the audio to a Chromecast. Does anyone know how?

You need the premium version for that.

Musicbee is the most natural music player I've ever used. Never understood clementine. Music players are subjective.

This looks like an advertising post to HN, here's a FOSS app instead which has been around for a long time:

https://vanilla-music.github.io/

Vanilla Music is the best FLOSS Android music player I've come across so far

Musicolet is much better than Vanilla Music in terms of UI and features.

If privacy is your concern, Musicolet cannot access the internet. It does not have that permission. I use the app, and I have checked for connections it tried to make on startup. There were one.

*there were none

"Vinyl" is also great. simple and attractive interface. available on F-Droid.

if network play is needed there's always VLC. combined with Wireshark and Samba, a solid personal music streaming setup.

This is a forum where people share what they've built.

But also it's hosted by a Venture Capitalist Firm.

So even if it was advertising I don't see the problem

The submission is not an article discussing it, nor a Changelog with a new feature, a commentary about the app or other HN worthy discussion launching content - it's simply a link to a random app website. HN has guidelines saying don't use the site for promotion (we have Show HN for that), and as a reader I consider it spam and am calling it out as such. Replace the link with something better about the app (blog review? news? IP lawsuit? whatever works) and we're back on track.

I usually prefer FOSS too, and your paranoia for advertising is healthy imo, but I was looking for a PowerAmp equivalent that I could sideload to an old offline KitKat phone for a car trip this weekend without cracking. I did find Vinyl and the others but didn’t care for their UI. This was what I ended up going with and liked it enough to share :)

This is the best music app I've ever used on Android. Fast, , no ads, does not access the internet, great UI, low on resources and space used.

One of the few apps I enjoy using on my phone. Many thanks to the developer for making a offline music player and not introducing ads in it!

I have tried most of the more enduring Android music apps, and Musicolet is among the best 10-15 of them, ever. But they don't all have good equalization options. "Bass boost" is catchy and popular, but being able to adjust things like track gain, album gain, pre-amp & post-amp levels, etc... makes ALL the difference on your average Android. Despite it's clunky UI, ArmAmp has been my favorite for about a decade and it has those things plus individually tuneable EQ bands. (Also anyone who ever used Deadbeef - which is what I used before - should be able to cope with ArmAmp's UI.)

Am just getting back into Android dev again, and the high perf audio api looks very versatile. Csound, Faust are also available. Software defined musical instruments are the end goal here. Oboe wrapper the underlying library. Coupled with Filament for PBR, am looking forward to exploring Android as a platform for real-time generative content creation ;)

An update on Android's audio latency

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2021/03/an-update-...

Besides, the Processing IDE, does anyone know of any on-device Android dev env that could also potentially support visual development? Thanks in advance!

I like this app, but you really need to be able to play/pause from any of the tabs. If you're all the way over on the end it can take several seconds to get back to a screen with media controls. This becomes a problem if you need to quickly pause, such as when someone walks up and begins talking to you.

Overall I really love the power user features but the UI on foobar2000 is much better. Only having two tabs and always knowing how many presses of the Back button it takes to close the app is good. Having Artist/Title/Folder/Playlist/etc be buttons on one screen is faster than scrolling through separate tabs for each.

What is wrong with swiping for the notification from anywhere to reach the media controls?

Foobar2k android is lovely, but it has quirks. If you use the "Shuffle albums/tracks" feature, then go back, there is no return. Reopening will reshuffle all the media again.

While I'd not call it "Music" Player for my purposes, I use it since a few years for playback of audiobooks and similar content for which a proper queueing feature is highly relevant.

It's been great for that, containing all the important features and proper queues. The few issues I had, I sent to the support email as bug reports or feature requests, and most of those have been resolved relatively quick.

So, not being open source (or at least source available) is the only remaining concern for me. Still, I'm happy to use it since there are only few mobile applications that have a similar no-nonsense style and still target power-users.

I recently came across AudioAnchor for audio books, it's designed for audio books so it's functionality may be better for you.

I've only used it lightly so far but it seems pretty good.

It's also open source and available in F-Droid:

https://github.com/flackbash/AudioAnchor

you may also like "Voice", also on F-Droid.

Thanks, just installed, looks great!

So it looks like offline is a feature now :D

Damn I'm still happy to have my iPod and Rockbox in my backpack, 80gb of music, days of battery and a nice firmware to play Vorbis/FLAC/Opus :)

I wanted an offline wall-mounted tablet driving music for my living room so that I could (gasp) BROWSE my own music collection. I settled on Musicolet after trying a few other options. The one missing feature I wanted was some sense of music _collections_ concept in the interface so that my wife and I could browse each of our individual collections on the same device. Other than that I've been very satisfied.

Am I the only one who looks at this and wonders; why not just use foobar2000? It has the same quality and stability on both android as on your desktops OS... And from what I can tell has most of the features of this but with a 15 year track record of stability (assuming you don't download an unstable third party add-ons)

On my new phone (Android 10) foobar2000 can't play tracks without stuttering. Haven't found a great replacement yet, but... that's one reason not to use it.

That's a bummer, still works on mine running android 10. But as we all know with phones, YMMV

Looks like AIMP (which I'm currently using) has every feature listed and more, but I'll give it a try.

Have been using it for more than two years now. Its clean and feature rich,while being lightweight and ad/tracker free. and it didnt even have internet permission until a recent update .So although I prefer FOSS alternatives, I still use this (with internet access blocked).

The site lists no internet permission as a feature - is that no longer the case?

Proper folder view: yes!

It won my heart instantly.

This option to chose a folder to search for is so obvious and useful too: yes, I do have a music folder....like every android phone out there and I do use it to put my music in.

I prefer Poweramp a lot more. It has a compact list view (a must-have for me which also seems to be a rare feature) with a fairly smooth UI. It also has upto a 32-band EQ.

This has been my main music player app for the past 2 years. What I love about it is the offline nature of the app for security reasons and the queues feature.

It is my default music player and I really love it! but I wish it had controls for the playback speed as I sometimes use it for podcasts or recorded talks.

Well, it does have those nowadays. Take a look at the dots-menu above the track-position slider within the playback view. It is called "Play speed and Pitch".

> controls for the playback speed

Click the 3 dots > playback speed and pitch

https://images2.imgbox.com/22/8f/gICcStTu_o.jpg

You can move this to the main menu by click the 3 dots> "Quick Access" Shortcuts> Tick the checkbox beside 'Playback speed and Pitch'

Musicolet is incredibly fast and capable with large libraries. I love it.

Is there something like this for audio books?

Smart Audiobooks handles offline audiobooks in every format I've thrown at it.

ReadEra is my recommendation for offline pdf/epub consolidated reader.

Nice find. Thank you.

AudioAnchor

This looks good, thank you :-)

'Voice' is good and FLOSS. It's on fdroid.

https://f-droid.org/packages/de.ph1b.audiobook/

Been using Musicolet for years, terrific.

Great app

Reply on news.ycombinator.com