I’ve always kept a small music library on my phone, so I’ve tried a lot of offline players. The paid apps are usually great, but most of the free ones are packed to the gills with ads. That’s why I dug up a few good ad-free alternatives.
How to Choose A Player From This List
What you need from a music player can be as different as your music taste. I’d love an app that has a clean, material-themed interface and no ads. Some want finer equalizer controls or effects. Others need maximum compatibility for music file formats.
You might just need the app to keep your offline music collection in one place. In that case, you’ll want easy metadata management (lyrics, album art, tags, track info, and such).
Then it’s the small touches that you can take into account. For example, people who like listening to entire albums would appreciate a gapless playback feature. Even if you only ever stream music, an offline music app can help you build and keep a library of podcasts and audiobooks.
I tried to put together a healthy mix of apps, so there should be something here for most people. I’ve also tried to highlight the best features of each app to help you pick.
Auxio – For Ease Of Use
“Simple and rational,” reads the Auxio description. When you first open the app, it’ll load every single audio file saved on your phone. Auxio will neatly organize them into tracks, albums, artists, and genres. You can tweak these tabs in settings. You can also exclude or include on-device folders in settings to remove non-songs.
There’s a search with filters. You can play a random song with the floating shuffle button. The playback controls stick to the bottom. On the bottom, you get a handy button for quick EQ toggles. The interface is intuitive because the developer is not trying to reinvent anything.
Auxio isn’t without a few special touches, though. It has a feature for auto playing your music when you connect to headphones. It can normalize the volume across the queue. And you can change the look and feel of the theme a little bit. You can turn it into a widget for your home screen, too.
It doesn’t have any tag editing or file management features. I’d skip Auxio if you need those.
It’s free, open-source, and privacy-friendly. You can sideload it using the APK package from the developer’s GitHub page or install it from the F-Droid store. It’s not available on Google Play.
Gramophone – Material Goodness
Gramophone features Google’s new Material You design. An elegant design, pretty animations, and adaptive colors make it stand out among local music players, who look stuck in 2015. I love the wiggly seek bar in particular.
The music player theme adapts to the album cover art. You can tweak the roundness of the art, and there’s a feature for enhancing album cover art, too, which makes a visible difference. It can’t autoplay music when you connect your headphones, but it does have support for lyrics, a sleep timer, and a 5-band equalizer.
It’ll automatically scan and sort your music into the standard library of tabs. You can block folders from showing up here, but that’s the extent of music management you’ll get with this app. You can’t edit tags, change album cover art, or delete stuff with Gramophone.
You can install Gramophone from the F-Droid store or Google Play Store.
Vanilla Music – For People Who Love Albums
Don’t let the unassuming design of Vanilla Music mislead you. This lightweight little app can do a lot. Gapless playback, where one track flows right into the next one, is enabled by default on it. For albums where tracks blend into each other without pause, this feature is a must-have. Its ReplayGain feature will normalize the volume across the album playback to keep a consistent loudness. That way, you won’t have to fiddle with the volume slider for every track.
To quickly skip a song, you can give your phone a light shake. You can configure screen gestures for easy playback control. Its randomizer button queues up a random song saved anywhere on your phone (a neat way to discover new music).
Vanilla also comes with five nifty plugins to handle all your metadata needs. The app itself is offline, but the plugins need an internet connection. These plugins (under 1MB each) can automatically pull metadata and album covers from the internet.
Another plugin allows you to manually edit tags. And yet another automatically finds lyrics. The list of features keeps going. There’s even a plugin that automatically launches Vanilla music when you connect headphones.
Vanilla Music Player and all its plugins are available on the F-Droid store.
Metro – Like Spotify But Offline
You can have a modern music app experience even if you’re not using Apple Music, Spotify, or something like that. That’s the promise of Metro. If you have a big library of downloaded music, this is the app you want.
It learns from your listening activity to curate a “For You” corner with auto-generated music mixes. Here you’ll find your history, last added songs, most played, and a shuffle tile. Scroll down to find your top artists, albums, favorites, and playlists. There are separate tabs for tracks, artists, albums, and playlists too.
Metro is chock-full of features, too many to count here, but I’ll highlight a few.
It lets you customize and personalize so much of the interface and controls. You can choose from this entire selection of music player skins, and they all adapt colors to the album cover art. There’s a long list of tweaks available for the Now Playing screen too.
You can enable gapless playback and set the app to auto-play music when you connect headphones. It can be configured to work with any bluetooth device. I also love this “Drive Mode” that simplifies the entire UI for easy playback control.
Spotify and Apple Music can create a little screen capture of the Now Playing screen to share on social media. Metro can do that too with its “Share Story” feature.
You can download it from F-Droid or the developer’s GitHub repo.
Metro and Vanilla are my favorites. I like to curate my collection in Vanilla and listen on Metro.
