Best iOS Music Players for iPhone and iPad

Do you have a large collection of digital music? Do you have it stored on your iDevice? Do you want it displayed in a shiny and comprehensive interface that lets you find whatever you’re looking for? We have just the right apps for you. Take a look at the best music player iOS has to offer and join us in dissecting each of these nine players in the search for the perfect one.

These apps are running on iOS and Android and some of them will amaze you with their graphics and options. They are complex but they don’t overwhelm the user with unnecessary settings. After some days of testing we have made you this list of players, starting with the ones available for iOS.

iAlbums

iAlbums is a free app that displays your music library in alphabetical order, showing album covers and allowing one to browse the music collection while a song is playing in the background. The interface is nice and shiny and it also displays liner notes the app pulls from Wikipedia, YouTube and the artist’s Facebook and Twitter pages. It also can pull info from Rovi’s AllMusicGuide and Google News, with some album covers being pulled even from DeviantArt.

What this app lacks is more web content, but other than that, together with the user interface iAlbums provides a better than average music experience that tops that of iOS’s default music player. To say nothing of the fact that this app is free of charge.

MyArtists

With a simplistic user interface, My Artists costs $3 and it pulls info from Last.fm and YouTube. It’s a simplistic music player that can display artist bios, images and videos and it can also show you music recommendations. And therein lies it’s true power.

You can see the full list of artists in the main window of the app and selecting one of these artists takes you to the albums of the aforementioned artists. While listening to a song you can purchase the albums or read about similar artists and preview their songs. You are sure to find many similar bands that would be to your liking. If you press the My Artists icon while on the Now Playing screen, you will be taken to a radio stream of recommendations that are based on that specific artist.

Panamp

Panamp is maybe the fastest music player out there on the iOS. It offers the same basic functions as the stock music player but loads your music collection much faster that it. It uses a cascading view that lets one quickly choose what he or she is looking for. The controls of the app remain on screen the whole time you navigate and you can sort the music collection by albums or by tracks.

The app also uses a dynamic queue, a playlist that works really fast. You can swipe on a track or album or artist and you can add it to the queue. You won’t even need to create a playlist. On the queue’s screen you can later order everything according to your needs. The downside is you can’t add multiple queues.

If you are the impatient type and would like to get things done quickly you’ll get accustomed to Panamp very fast. The app costs only $1 and it’s worth every penny.

Groove 2

Groove 2 is more than a player. It’s also a personal DJ and mixer that can study your music habits and create mixes for you. “Groovy Mix” will take one artist from your music library and create a mix of tunes that go well with one of the artist’s songs. The “Surprise Me” function creates a random playlist each time your press it. The “Favorites” function will play a list of songs that are currently rated the highest or are among the ones you listen to the most. Finally, “Three of a Kind” will play three songs all belonging to the same artists.

Then there’s the “Better Together” feature that will create playlists by summing up two related artists that would go well together. These playlists can all be saved if you want to listen to them in the future.
Groove 2 can also be used as a simplistic music player but even so it has some pretty amazing features. You select an artist and then start playing an album belonging to that particular artist. You can also start a mix based on that particular artists. The Library can be sorted by artists, albums and genre tags pulled from Last.fm.

Groove 2 makes music mixing fun again. It supports gesture controls and it has an on-screen mini player that will remain there indefinitely. It’s intuitive and fast to navigate and also gives you sharing via Facebook or Twitter. It’s also compatible with Apple TV and AirPlay.
The app costs a mere $2.

Vinyl Tap

If you’re a true audiophile you must have your own vinyl collection. And if you can’t carry it around with you, you can at least have MP3 copies of it lying around in your pocket. But what if you’d have an app that mimics the look of everything you love about vinyl? Vinly Tap is an iPad app that will let you play albums on virtual record players. It even mimics scratches and the crackles associated with such player bringing you a true audiophile experience. You will be able to select between 33 RPM and 45 RPM, flip over the record and adjust the strobe of the platter.

Choose one of the available record players and start listening to music just like you’d do at home with your record playing hardware.

The application costs $2 and comes with some pretty nice options. Give it a try.

Shazam Player

Shazam Player is a free app brought to you by the same people that release Shazam. Its main feature is LyricPlay and it displays lyrics through LyricFind. It does so in tune with the playing music which makes it a veritable karaoke machine. Shazam player also lets you group your music into playlists called “The Good List” and “The Bad List”. The music in the Bad List will never play when you shuffle. The app will also display artist bios, reviews, YouTube videos and will allow one to share via Facebook or Twitter.

Track 8

This app costs $2 and it’s a weird one. It uses an interface similar to Microsoft’s Metro. It doesn’t go beyond playing music. It is simple, intuitive, basic. It also uses Last.fm to display album covers and will allow one to search for music. It will also display an image of the currently playing artist in the background, but that pretty much it.

Planetary

This is also a free app and it shows you how your music would look like would it be a planetary system. It’s a new way of looking at music and a nice one too. Artists in your music library are represented by stars and are stratified by galaxies represented alphabetically. Planets are albums and they orbit their respective stars much like regular planets. The surface of the planets draw their graphics from the album covers they represent so no two planets look alike.

And what about tracks you ask? They are moons orbiting the planets and they rotate around them at a speed represented by their audio file length.

You can pinch to zoom to search for artists and swipe to achieve other movements. It is a little tricky to navigate around the universe of your music but it really looks awesome. It’s not one of the most intuitive players out there but it surely is one of the most peculiar ones.

TuneWiki

This last iOS app is also free and it uses a user-generated lyrics database to find the words to the songs you play. It can also translate lyrics into 40 languages. TuneWiki is also great for discovering new music. Knowing the lyrics but not knowing the song is solved now. You can share songs through Facebook and Twitter and a feature called Music Maps will show you what songs are currently popular around the globe.

These are the nine apps we wanted you to know about. Try them, test them, pick the one you like best and insert those headphones in your ears.