Any mobile user today would swear that apart from calling and messaging, one of the mostly or commonly accessed utility of his mobile phone is music playback. Just plug in your headset or hook your device up to a bigger sound system and enjoy the tunes.
Music playback got even advanced with the advent of smartphones, especially after Android came in to the scene as it has a variety of applications that helps users boost their music listening experience multifold.
Today we have zeroed in on five such applications. These applications are not just simple media players but have certain uniqueness in them that make them as one of the top contenders in our top 5 list.
So if you are in to music then here are our top 5 music apps available on Android that you must have, atleast one of them.
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Sensor Music Player
When it comes to uniqueness, the Sensor music player is likely to be on the uppermost curve because the way it helps user play through tunes. The Sensor music player although comes with basic music playback capabilities but harnesses the Sensors on the device for better control over music playback.
The application makes use of the proximity and Accelerometer sensors of smartphones to control the music playback and that is what makes this music player unique. With this, users are not required to take the device out of their pocket and then turn on the display to open the music application and change tracks or to pause and play.
The application has three main controls including Swipe, which enables users to skip songs just by swiping the fingers across the devices’ screen but not touching it. Also, you can pause or play a song just by placing your palm over the screen for about a second.
The tap action is especially useful while traveling where you need to slap your device to change the song while the device sits perfectly inside your pocket. The third and last preset option is the hammer action where users are required to slam the table or the surface where the device is kept to shuffle songs.
Users also get custom option where users can select which mode should work for them and which sensor (accelerometer or proximity) should be used to control songs.
Currently, the Google Play Store offers several video playback apps that are stand alone or dependent on certain codec packages for video playback but VLC player application comes with integrated support for codec’s thereby provides better and faster playback than most audio and video players without the need of downloading codec’s for different video formats.
VLC player also supports a large number of audio formats as well and is also very light on system resources thus enabling faster playback even then the default audio/video applications. The application has a bare minimum requirement when it comes to hardware resources that make it very useful for the devices with low internal memory.
The VLC player application supports Android devices running version 2.1 and above. This App is in beta phase and might have a few bugs.
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Saavn
As one of the most popular music streaming service, Saavn offers the best features required to listen to music. This service offers a great collection of Bollywood and Indian music. The best part of Saavn is that one need not purchase the songs from the website and also it can be accessed anytime.
Using the app, users can search for Bollywood tracks and can create their own playlist, save their favorite tracks and even the radio stations offered.
The service also offers its own weekly top 15 tracks so you can always experiment with new type of tracks. There’s also a tab on the home screen of the app that offers a random track once tapped on it. Only thing is that one requires a good data network – 3G or WiFi, to keep the songs playing.
Users can access the service using Facebook login as well and can even share their favorite songs with friends and family through the social network.
Many a times, we like a song but don’t know about the artist or the album to which it belongs which makes it very difficult to find it out to listen to some other time.
But with SoundHound app, you can keep all such problems at bay.
So if you like a tune, just run the SoundHound app pointing your smartphone towards the tunes and the application will search the song for you in a matter of seconds.
The app has an inbuilt engine that identifies the song and sends out cues to the server that matches the song with the captured note or line form the son providing the result to you in no time. Also users can get online streaming links for the song if they are connected to a high speed network and listen to the tunes right there and favorite that song which can be bought later on.
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Google Play Music
The Google Play Music is basically the native music player for the Android devices. Google has recently brushed up the user interface of the app. Now the navigation has been tweaked and the action now gets the transport controls.
It allows users to queue songs to be played next from the media library. That is a big feature for not everyone would like to playlist every single time and not use shuffle. There is better album art preview and also there is ‘Recent’ tab that shows last played songs.
Google Play Music is the native music player which also support lossless music playback and also pulls in the free music if you are signed up for Google Music beta, and if the service is available for your region. Currently Google Music beta is not available in India.