PowerAmp
Cum on feel the noize...
Android App of the Week The one feature of iOS that beats Android like a red-headed stepchild is the music player. Hardly surprising given Apple’s experience with media player UIs, but that still doesn’t excuse just how basic the Android alternative is, or how unimpressive the efforts of the various Android phone makers have been.
PowerAmp: iPod beater
To the rescue comes PowerAmp with its rather fine graphical front end, a couple of nice little navigation touches and some good old-fashioned tone controls to make things sound as good as they look.
As well as using the more usual artist/album/genre menus, PowerAmp lets you navigate your music library by swiping a Now Playing album cover up or down to move from one album to the next and from left to right to move from one track to the next. Select shuffle and swipes brings up random albums and tracks.
Tap the little volume button in the bottom right-hand corner and a new screen launches letting you change the volume, bass and treble, and access a ten-band graphic equaliser.
Pump up the volume
A recent update has brought direct access to the Dolby and SRS sound-modification settings on some HTC handsets, including the Desire HD. Hopefully other handsets will soon get similar support - the sound modification controls on Motorola’s Defy are buried so deep you need to invite Phil Harding and the rest of the Time Team gang over to help find them.
Next page: Send lawyers, guns and money
COMMENTS
Stop button?
Are you afraid the MP3 will wear out if you leave it on pause for too long?
Dubious Taste
"beats Android like a red-headed stepchild"?
Looks like a nice app though.....
Pauses
What annoys me about the default music player is that it restarts music automatically when a call ends - which would be fine if I was using a phone headset to talk. But when using normal headphones and unplugging them to take the call, the music restarts as soon as the call is ended and usually blasts out of the speakers so I sound like one of thoze kidz on the busez wif their phonez and the load muzic innit.
storing the current playback position
Nice to see I'm not the only one who listens to very long music files albeit mine are in mp3 (created using an input and output plugin in winamp to timer record audio). The MP3 output doesn't write suitable tags, and I can't be bothered to update all the files so mine use only the file name for identification.
My HTC Hero struggles with them (2-3 hours at 192 kbps), but once it has started playing it seems to be fine.
Something worth mentioning is the ability to remember where the player is in a very long file. Not a big deal for 4 min music tracks but pretty important for longer recordings. I understand that PowerAmp will now store the current playback location when play back is paused (I asked the Dev if he could add this and to his credit he did it within a few days), but this only happens when play back is paused.
On the other hand Mixzing seems to store on pause and also logs its current position in the background every so often which has proven to be useful on those occasions when my handset has randomly rebooted itself while playing and MixZing just picked up from where the Hero went titsup.
