Send lawyers, guns and money
As for sound, well PowerAmp can’t work miracles but having simple bass and treble controls makes finding the audio sweet spot rather easier than having to mess about with a plethora of EQ settings and sound profiles.
Choose your cover art, choose your widget (right)
Alongside the equaliser sits a pre-amp control which is a handy way to give the volume some extra oomph in loud surroundings. PowerAmp also adds Flac and WMA file support to the Android usuals.
The app comes with a built-in ID3-tag editor and if you press and hold an album cover alternate sleeve images are summoned up. To access music directly from your homepage there is a selection of attractive 4x1, 4x2 and 4x4 widgets.
The only downside is the price - the free version is only good for a 15-day trial and if you want to carry on using it you will need to cough up $4.99 (£3). Not a huge amount on money, true, but it a music player of this quality really should be part of the OS. ®
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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.
