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Comment by mark-r | Hacker News Reader

I have a superb collection of MP3s on my phone, but Google in their wisdom decided to erase Play Music. Of course there are no shortage of players for Android, but I've fallen victim to the paralysis of choice; Play Music was perfect, and I don't know which of the available players is closest to it. So my MP3s have been inaccessible for over a year.

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It depends what features you're looking for, but I've found VLC (available on F-Droid) to be one of the nicer ones. It does video playing also and has gestures like skipping forwards and backwards, so I'd have it installed anyway, and so I configured it to also scan my music folder. Mostly I just go into all songs and play on shuffle but you can also select by artist and stuff.

VLC's killer feature, for me, is "this folder is full of music files. Play them in order." It seems most other music apps heavily prioritize artist and album search, which is great if you listen to mainstream music and not so great if you listen to a lot of soundtracks, or have poorly tagged collections of music ripped from goodness knows where. VLC lets me organize my files as actual files, and gets on with playing those files rather than getting in my way. 10/10.

> Google in their wisdom decided to erase Play Music

This was the final straw for me.

As a developer who needed access to both, for years I ran Apple and Android side by side. Sometimes I'd switch the SIM over literally weekly depending upon mood (the danger of account loss in both cases is so high that nothing I do beyond app purchases is ever tied to or held against my Apple or Google account as that means placing all my digital stuff at the whim of huge corporations with no practical customer service).

I have MP3s. Curated and organised. The world of tech is heading for rental of everything possible (and the time will come when it is unaffordable with so many subscriptions) so I see no reason to abandon what I already own in order to pay for it again every month forever.

Then Google removed Play Music (and hence the online library). I know there are alternatives, but there was no need to destroy localised music on the phone. It was a totally cynical means of creating new subscriptions for YouTube Music by leveraging the Android platform. Very much not good and probably mono/duopolistic legally speaking.

So now I'm iPhone only. Not out of love for Apple (I used both side by side for years), and not out of naivety, but because daily the forced choice of the lesser evil drives Google ever further from consideration. By targeting my audio it hit me where it hurt, and there's a price to pay for that.

Despite death by a thousand cuts, in the end each of us has a red line somewhere; the pure, greedy, duopolistic, arrogant cynicism of the death of Google Play was one such for me.

I got an Android DAP for Christmas last year and found that I really like musicolet: https://krosbits.in/musicolet/

It works really well. It has the playlisting/queueing metaphors that I prefer and it has a decent interface for finding things or even playing all of the albums from a specific artist.

> Google in their wisdom decided to erase Play Music

I felt that pain. I would be interested in something self hosted that looked and felt similar to Play Music, but I have yet to find one.

Edit: Then I scrolled down a bit more and saw someone linked to Navidrome. It might suffice for me. https://www.navidrome.org/

I ended up using Pulsar music player, only because we were camping and a friend send me the apk via bluetooth (I was a spotify person before I started heavily going out).

It simply worked for my old folderwise-kept mp3s etc, and it also displays embedded lyrics in the mp3 files which was a killer feature.

It's not that I love this app dearly, it's just that it got the job done and didn't need replacement.

I use the default Samsung Music app. It integrates nicely with Edge Panels on Samsung phones.

I second the sibling comment.

Try VLC. That's what I settled on also.

It's simple and just works.

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