Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, people used to rely heavily on offline music player apps like Poweramp to listen to their favorite songs. Of course, the native music player apps that shipped with smartphones weren't very good for us music lovers. Although many of us use music player apps like Spotify and YouTube Music, but some of us still want a powerful offline music player app.
There could be many reasons for this. You have a collection of songs (perhaps hard to find) from your college days and want to hold onto them. You love the advanced equalizer and other settings that come with these apps. You need to listen to a lot of audio files. You need to, right?
Here are two of the best music player apps I've come across recently. Poweramp has been my longtime favorite, and BlackPlayer comes highly recommended by many of my friends.
Let's see how they stack up against each other.
1. User Interface and Design
Both apps have a functional design that's easy to navigate. Poweramp fails to recognize the subtle difference between music and recorded calls by default. You can easily change your folder settings to avoid this glitch.
In Poweramp, there are four tabs. The first contains various shortcuts, such as playlists, genres, artists, and albums. The second is the powerful Crazy Equalizer. The third is the Search option for searching for your favorite songs. The last one is for Settings.
BlackPlayer has done a better job and created two separate folders: one for music and one for recorded calls. The traditional three-dot menu works well and hides similar options like playlists, the equalizer, and settings. You'll also notice tabs at the top of the screen for tracks, artists, genres, and more. BlackPlayer makes the search feature easier across all screens by placing it in the top-right corner of the screen.
Both Poweramp and BlackPlayer come with a dark theme enabled, but Poweramp does a better job. It has a darker user interface compared to the latter. Funnily enough, it's called BlackPlayer.
2. The rate
Poweramp's modulation is insanely powerful. It lets you do a lot of what you seriously need to understand how sound works and the subtle differences between the R/L balance knob. Poweramp supports a 10-band equalizer with separate volume and treble knobs. It also has 16 presets if you don't want to use manual mode.
There are two additional markers. One is for tempo, the other for reverb. Both come with the preset. Don't mess with them if you don't know what to do. Poweramp settings can affect the sound.
Compared to Poweramp, BlackPlayer seems less powerful but still performs well. It comes with a 5-band equalizer, which works well but isn't suitable for advanced users who know how to get the most out of these settings. There are 11 presets, covering most of the common ones.
The Sound Effects tab controls bass boost, but there's no treble volume. The frequency doesn't offer any manual override. BlackPlayer comes with an Amplifier setting that's missing in Poweramp. The annoying thing about BlackPlayer is that you have to enable each setting before you can change it, whether it's the equalizer or the sound effects.
Poweramp offers more ways to change and control the sound, but BlackPlayer will satisfy most users who aren't familiar with how these settings affect the sound, for better or worse.
3. Settings for this command
Not every song comes with album art, but both Poweramp and BlackPlayer will track it down for you. In Poweramp, long-click a song to select the Album Art and choose the song you like most.
In BlackPlayer, I could find the setting for the cover art, but it wasn't related to the song I was listening to. Also, there was no option to search and select the album art. I'm a visual person and like to see album art.
Both come with a sleep timer when you want the app to stop playing music after a set amount of time. In BlackPlayer, you can change tracks simply by swiping up and down when in full screen mode or to the left when the player is at the bottom of the screen.
Poweramp works similarly and lets you change tracks by swiping whether you're in full screen mode or not.
4. Playlists
Playlists help us organize songs and playlists based on our personal needs. Both Poweramp and BlackPlayer support playlists. However, the process is different. In Poweramp, you can long-press any song to enable multi-select mode. Selecting multiple songs and adding them to the same playlist is then easy.
Did you notice how the Tags and Album Art options are highlighted when you select more than one song? Yes. However, BlackPlayer also supports multi-selection, but you have to enable it from the menu first.
On the plus side, BlackPlayer allows you to easily import playlists in two formats: m3u and .m3u8. Three playlists will also be automatically created based on your listening history: recently added, recently played, and most played. The playlist import option in Poweramp is hidden deep within the app's settings.
Poweramp uses similar buttons to create a top-rated playlist that you can create while listening to songs.
5. Price
Here's the lowdown. BlackPlayer is ad-supported but completely free. An Ex version is available for $0.99, which adds more features like additional fonts and themes, Chromecast support, and tons of customization options. It's hard to beat, and the features are truly impressive.
Poweramp offers more when it comes to settings like the equalizer. However, it will cost you $4.99 and there are no ads. Both support Google Assistant, Chromecast, headphones, and many more file formats. However, Poweramp supports more file formats than BlackPlayer.
The Sound of Music
Both Poweramp and BlackPlayer have tons of options and settings to customize your music player the way you want. There are so many skins (Poweramp), themes, fonts (BlackPlayer), and music player settings in both that they can't be covered in a single guide. So here's the bottom line. BlackPlayer is cheaper and good enough, but Poweramp is the king when it comes to the audio settings that matter most to audiophiles.
