Best iPhone Alternative Music Players Apps
The Best Music Player Application for iPhone. Which might this be? I’m sure we are not bringing any real news to anybody when assigning this award to the iPod, of course, the built-in iPhone music app. The iPod is without doubt the best choice and it kinda has no real competitors for its category. It is this well designed, and has mesmerized all of us with its great set of features.
Running on an iOS platform, the app comes along with your iPhone, so being incorporated in it from the very beginning practically makes it a free app. The feature set for the iPod is so vast that it could be of use to you under different circumstances, making it your potential best friend.
I will briefly mention the features the iPod includes, starting with: playing music, podcasts, audiobooks, music videos, TV shows, movies, and more; creating and editing playlists, being able to search all of your content, having control music playback with your voice by using Voice Control, being able to create Genius Mixes. Moreover, while you are using other apps, you can have audio content play in the background, which is quite cool. It also has a memory of the last position for spoken-word content, so if you want to resume next time you play, this feature enables you to do so.
What else you have with the iPod is: stream music to and from your iPhone with AirPlay, tilt horizontally to browser your music in Cover Flow mode, an easy and quick access to playback controls (by double clicking the home button and then just swiping from left to right) and integration with Ping, Apple’s music social network. What we like the most though is that it enables subtitle support for videos with compatible subtitle tracks, and that you have the possibility to adjust the playback speed of the audio content you are playing. Nevertheless, we should also mention that when you are playing them, you can also share iTunes store links to podcasts and music. The iPod doesn’t at this stage only lean on the advantages of the iOS, but has a series of set features that simply makes it so lovable and easy to use. This is especially due to its simple to use interface, designed in such an intuitive and effortless manner. Although it has a great stocking memory, and a big collection for that matter, you can still easily navigate throughout it with no problems whatsoever.
Competitive features
The iPod is nowadays leader of the music player apps for the iPhone, as previously mentioned. If at the beginning this was due to its never before seen great features, the situation might slightly differ now. It was its use of private APIs that made the iPod stand out among all other apps, so it was able to therefore conquer new peaks than any other app has previously done. Things have however evolved for everybody and we can’t really say now that the iPod is quite that different. Nevertheless, it still outranks all other apps in its category, and perhaps the reason behind its being such a competitive music player might be that the competition isn’t really that developed. What makes it so cool and popular basically relies on the features we have already presented at the beginning. The app can manage almost every media type that iTunes can handle in the very first place, and it is very easy with the iPod to simply make playlists, as it additionally has a multitude of ways in which you can browse your big collection, or remembering where you left off in a podcast and audio book. The list doesn’t stop here (check the other features above once more, if necessary). So what the app basically does it that it provides you with a multitude of features you can make use of in order to ultimately have a great, effortless music experience (or for that matter, any type of experience mentioned, be it musical, video, etc.).
Extra work required
Although the app has a series of great features, that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. On the contrary, it actually has quite a long way to go from here and some improvements here and there are highly recommended to make the app better. Specialists have cataloged this lacking as an universally common feature of the iPhone apps, meaning that the lack of competition can result in an underdeveloped range of feature sets for the Apple apps. We can therefore address this theory from two different angles: the first would be that the lack of competition has been triggered by Apple’s tough store requirements that request not to duplicate any feature or functionality. But their approach has been quite different and lenient lately that it brings us to the second angle of addressing the theory, which is that the iPod is considered to be so ahead of the other apps that it is not believed to be able to surpass its greatness, so steady attempts are not even made in this respect.
If you want to update a podcast these days through the phone, you will immediately see it is not an easy thing to do, but the process can bring a headache on the way. Let’s say you want to get a new episode. Besides having to check for it manually, you will also be taken straight to the iTunes Music Store app where you need to find out for yourself if a new episode is available or not. This is not an easy thing to do however, as you will not always be able to see the number of the episode you want to get. While this can be the case at times (not that often we add), you will most often not detect it, as most of the shows just name their episodes with the name of the show. Thus you will not be able to check the actual episode number on your iPhone’s display – simply because it doesn’t fit there (only the name shall fit). There is therefore a lot to improve when it comes to the posting chapter. You can make use of posting dates, which can be of use, but they will not really work for podcasts. Let’s hope the issues shall be addressed.
Another chapter we would really like amendments to be brought onto is related to the Library Sharing support. Yes, it would indeed be very cool to listen to any music on the local network, wouldn’t you like this? To be more exact, this would translate into your sharing directly from your device and then picking up other shared libraries on the local network. You might come in here and say that this is something you can do with Home Sharing or even with the Remote app to a certain extent. But is is not quite the same. You there need to use your Apple credentials (Apple ID and pass), so we are pretty sure you are not that keen on sharing these with other people. If you are also thinking about the wireless sync, we agree too. It would be good to have it and also possible (you can even have it over 3G), but we can’t say that’s a must here necessarily. It is actually quite more of an iTunes feature so let’s keep it like that for now.
The list of improvements that can be brought here comprises a series of other small features as well (that could have a great impact overall however), and perhaps it’s worth mentioning here adjusting the EQ in the player on a per-song basis, or supporting additional formats as well (not a likely feature to have too soon unfortunately). However, its simple to use and friendly iPod interface blended with the great current features it encompasses makes the iPod app the cool app it is today.
The Competition
Although the iPod ranks so high, there are still some apps that strive to take its place (not likely to happen any time soon though). Although its competitors are not yet that strong, they are not to be left out when discussing about the best music player app for iPhone, so let’s see what the other apps have in store for us, the consumers.
Let’s start with the Amp Music Player which has been clearly designed to be a replacement for the iPod. Among the extra features it encompasses it’s worth highlighting some of the ones that caught are eye, and these are skinning, queuing, lyrics and concert information as well. At the $1 price, the app has come up with quite a different way of navigating through your library. We advise you get out of your comfort zone and give it a go.
Then we have SoundHound, which you can find in the free category of music apps. While you can use this app to access your whole music library, the app is primarily designed with the purpose of detecting songs. To make it even clearer, when we have stated music library, we are not referring to podcasts at all, but simply to music library. If are really keen on (only) the music functionality, then this might be the one for you: it has lyric support and also song detection.
Let’s take a peek into AudioPress too. It is also a free app and could be of great use if you are not really a fan of a manual process for updating your podcasts. It relies a lot on its spoken word content features and as mentioned, can be great for you if you want it to take care of all the podcast-related tasks you would perhaps want yout iPod app to do. So if you are a great fan of spoken word content, then go for it. You will also be able to benefit from its other functions, such as Internet radio (the app can therefore read you the current weather forecast, if you wish).
To continue, if you are of the opinion that Apple’s mobile music player might not be that great, then let’s keep looking into the other third-party developers who have taken a shot in this field. Most of the them have actually done a pretty creative and good job, we must admit, and they implemented reliable (and fun) alternatives for browsing album covers or even playing track selections, for instance.
We shall continue with one of the free apps - iAlbums, which is the equivalent of a Google search engine let’s say. What iAlbums does is that it can show you all the info you might find on a selected artist and album, and hence centralize them in a single place. That makes this app so loved amongst iPhone users, and we must give it credit for it, it’s earned it. Another extra feature it provides is that it can scan your music library and then create a showcase of your album covers. Cool. But that is not it. The browsing experience is also much better, and if you happen to have any missing album covers in your library then iAlbums automatically downloads and adds it. To brag even more about it, iAlbums can perform a search info from over 20 different sources on the web if you tap to play a song. It also then gives you a collection of stories, quotes and reviews on the current choice, so you can have a much extended perspective on your current selection.
While all of these sound great, there is yet one more to present, and it is perhaps this one that stands out among the rest. If you select a song (by tapping on the quill pen icon at the bottom menu bar), you can even download lyrics for it if you want, iAlbums makes it all possible. We must warn you though that it does not always come up with the lyrics for all the songs, but the rate of success is higher than the one for its not being able to find lyrics, so we can’t actually complain. It pretty much saves you the hassle to search for the titles manually and then trying to find your lyrics yourself.
Another free app is the Musiconizer, and it can also be of great use to your for a quick access into your music and then reaching your music albums library pretty fast. What it has is the feature to create a display of your album covers for browsing and in-app music playing, which is exactly what the other apps can do as well, but the Musiconizer does not stop here when it comes to functionality. It brings an innovative note by letting you turn any chosen album into an app that you can access by tapping and playing from your iPhone home screen. If this sounds appealing to you and you want to give it a go, then all you need to do to make it happen is select an album and tap the Install Webclip button. There isn’t much for you to do from this point on, as the app will guide you all the way through the process, presenting you the steps you need to take to save the webclip link to the homepage of your iPhone. If you have a multitude of favorite albums in mind for creating and saving, then it would be best to centralize them in a single file for quick and easy access.
The Tactile Music Controller is another cool app worth mentioning, which you mostly make use of if you are into browsing your albums to locate music, as it gives you the option to play around, check the songs and then select an album to play. This is very different to the Music app of the iPhone that includes Cover Flow for browsing albums and where you need to turn your iPhone to landscape position just to access the feature. It can be even more inconvenient if you use the orientation lock, because it will then additionally require another tab to access Cover Flow.
So you might want to get better acquainted with the Tactile Music Controller that saves you the hassle. Let’s get into more detail regarding the cover albums for this app: they get randomly spread out over a “wooden table”, and it is from here that you can scroll around them and then double-tap one to play, if you want. You are also only one tap away from flipping a cover over and getting the track listing. You could also play selections from within the app, if you like. The Tactile Music Controller is not exactly all fun and games either, and it might disappoint by not being able to scan your entire library and do all the job for it. You will still have to manually add albums to the player, so this might be a minus for you.
The last app I want to address today is the Music Stats, and it is free if you are wondering. The app does exactly what its name advertises it to do. So if you are particularly into music and you really make use of your iTunes to just collect a multitude of songs and then be proud of sharing your all time top 25 hits, for instance, you might want to thank us for introducing you to the Music Stats app. It will surely make it all easier for you. To be more specific, it can scan your iPhone’s music library and based on that provide you with the exact stats on the total play count, or total skip count. It can also give you the stats on what your total number of songs is, and even total albums, artists, genres number. And the list does go on. If you want to be even more impressed, then let us tell you that the app can report the song you listen to the most, but also the ones that you are not very particularly keen on listening (thus the least listened to songs). If this is also not enough, perhaps you’d like to know that you can email and paste your stats to your Facebook account. This is a very handy little app to have on your music app folder, but, just like the other, could use a little upgrade and improvements. For instance, it does note use your listening customs to create a Smart Playlist, but perhaps its developers will amend this little issue.
We hope we have been of aid to you in the potential discovery of new apps to make your music experience a lot better. While you will solely restrict your music experience to using the so popular iPod, or expand your horizons and check out what else is there in terms of third party music apps, you will only have to win from any of the options. It is now high time to go back to using our music player app for our iPhone! Catch you later, guys. And enjoy!
