I tested all FOSS music players and concluded they're all imperfect

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on /r/fossdroid

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  • RetroMusicPlayer

    Best Material You Design music player for Android

  • Retro has some features behind a paywall that only works with Google Play. It has gapless playback according to the app's description and settings but it didn't work for me even after I enabled it in settings. It can exclude folders though. No .cue support. The UI is too flashy and a bit clunky. Searching for a song brings up its own menu.

  • music_player_lite

    An elegant and lightweight music player for android

  • Music Player Lite is incomplete with many missing features. It's unusable since it sorts songs in an album in alphabetical order. It has a dropdown menu where you can select the folders (the app has picked up) to exclude, this is way better than navigating through all directories in /sdcard.

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

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  • APlayer

    Android Music Player

  • APlayer ostensibly has excluding folders feature, which doesn't actually work. It doesn't have gapless playback. Animations feel slow, gestures aren't intuitive.

  • android-noad-music-player

    Noad Music Player for android. Available on Play Store.

  • Noad Player has an option to hide Whatsapp Audio and audio files shorter than a minute, but it can't exclude custom folders. The app has a persistent notification as long as it's open whether you're playing some music or not. Starts sorting from the last song in the album.

  • OpenMusic

    Discontinued OpenMusic is an open-source Android music player written in Kotlin with the aim of creating an easy-to-use app for exchanging and listening to top-quality music. Help us create it! (by Benji377)

  • SocyMusic is incomplete and unusable.

  • Be Simple Music Player is discontinued and was a fork of Music Player Go anyway.

  • Jockey

    A music player for Android focused on simplicity, performance, and design

  • Jockey crashes and can't jump to a timestamp in certain songs.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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  • blade-player

    Discontinued Android music player that plays from local library, Spotify or Deezer

  • Blade is unique as it can play songs from your local and Spotify/Deezer libraries. You could even think of it as a lightweight FOSS Spotify/Deezer client. It has limited features and an old UI. Opening the "Folders" menu and choosing Internal Storage crashes the app. It doesn't have gapless playback and can't exclude folders. Luckily, Blade v2 written from scratch seems to be on its way.

  • Eleven

    CyanogenMod/LineageOS Eleven music player

  • Eleven Music Player crashes and is unusable.

  • Sense

    Android Music Player (by SenseMusic)

  • Sense simply doesn't work, it's unusable.

  • tortoise-legacy

    Discontinued Android music player

  • Tortoise keeps crashing, it's unusable.

  • TimberX

    Material theme music player that works across all form factors (phones, wear, auto, cast, assistant) and uses latest tools (Kotlin, Architecture components, Room, Databinding)

  • TimberX has bugs here and there and it doesn't have gapless playback. The developer has been inactive for over a year.

  • harmonoid

    🎵 Plays & manages your music library. Looks beautiful & juicy. Playlists, visuals, synced lyrics, pitch shift, volume boost & more.

  • Harmonoid is incomplete and unusable.

  • vanilla

    Vanilla Music Player for Android (by vanilla-music)

  • There isn't.

  • SaaSHub

    SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

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NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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