UKH

Old fart here.  Just bought a new (well, refurbished) Pixel 7 and was somewhat disappointed to find that the music app that comes with it is the pretty execrable YT Music.  It supposedly can play music from the library on the phone - of which I have quite a lot, from my old Xperia phone - but for some reason it appears to be utterly unable to work out the album structure.  Albums seem to be listed twice, but they're not simply the same album appearing twice: what it does is it lists a random selection of the songs from the album in one instance of said album, and the remainder of the songs in the other instance.  Which makes it pretty useless if, as is more often the case than not, I just want to listen to an album from start to finish.

I've done some digging around online and it appears that YT Music is indeed generally regarded as pants.  I've tried a number of other music apps, either recommended in discussions or rated highly on the Play store, but so far the only one I've found which doesn't want me to either sign up for a streaming subscription (I don't do streaming music, so yes I guess I am an old fart) or is unable to present the music already on the phone in a sensible way, is a name from the past: Poweramp.  I'm actually prepared to pay the one-off price for that app, as opposed to an ongoing subscription for music I don't particularly want to listen to (all of which subs seem to be more per month than the one-off cost of Poweramp anyway), but I was wondering whether anyone knows of a free app which just bloody works like the one on my Xperia used to, and like Poweramp appears to do.

Oh, and it'll need to be integrated with Android Auto as well (which I believe Poweramp is).  Not asking much, am I?!

You can use poweramp unlimited without making a payment of £5.99 but i would as it is great.

Yes it can be used with android auto.

Plus very good support with any questions.

My brother recommended Musicolet for this. I haven't used it yet but he thought it was excellent.

Have you tried VLC for Android?

Ahh, Poweramp. The first app I ever bought, back in the days of Android 2. I still use it for playing albums, as it's far better than the godawful Spotify app. A bargain at whatever they charge for it nowadays, especially compared to what I'm paying for Spotify.

Currently using VLC for its hi res/  lossless playback, seems OK. 

A +1 for Musicolete: it's compact, easy to use, and does playlists well (which I never had much luck with in PowerAmp)

VLC

I'm on Musicolet as well. Simple, easy to use.

Same here. Nice and simple but is capable of more complex tasks/requirements.

I use the free version of muzio for playing podcasts and it's fine. You get the odd advert but not many and it doesn't interfere with it playing. 

Media monkey and it'll even download the album art for you 

I use rocket player. Syncs with iTunes on a pc if needed and works with android auto.

Another musicolet user here. I had the same dilemma when moving from one phone to another, and it's what I've settled on. Free, does a decent job and works reasonably with android auto. 

I use Audify which seems to tick the boxes.

VLC player has been mentioned above, but I feel it needs more attention.  It is open source and free, no ads etc.  Works with AndroidAuto, and has Windows and Linux versions too.  Its a venerable first option for most techy types I know (assuming they're the experts on all things 'techy'). 

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.videolan.vlc

Thanks for the many suggestions, that's a good selection apps to audition.Audify and Media Monkey both have the same problem as YT Music: albums listed twice (though not all albums, in the case of Media Monkey, which is even weirder) with the tracks split between the two listings.  No idea why this might be happening but it makes them unusable for me.  It also took Media Monkey a lot longer to scan my music library than the other candidates.

I am familiar with VLC on my Mac, but I don't like it very much - the UI could definitely qualify as 'venerable'.  I only use it for stuff that Quicktime Player baulks at.  The Android version seemed to have a tendency to re-scan my music library at the slightest provocation, which was tedious.

Rocket Player seems to take an age to fire up.  It scanned my music library OK but doesn't seem to have a clean exit function (compared to Musicolet, for example, which is just tap the back arrow twice and it exits).

At the moment Musicolet is looking like the preferred option: very straightforward UI, and it scanned my music library quickly and without problems.  It does seem to be integrated with Android Auto: it's listed in the settings, but I haven't tried it in the car yet.  I will keep Poweramp as a backup option for now.

(One minor annoyance with Android Auto is that Google Assistant doesn't seem to be able play music from my library - it insists on using a streaming service 🙁)

Well i use blackplayer EX. But i haven't really tried other options so not sure how it compares. It works fine for me usually.

If you’re having issues with your album listings in multiple apps I’d suggest it’s the metadata at fault, rather than the app. Are the titles *exacty* the same? Or do you have some rogue capitals, spaces, or album artist names? (Album artist is a different field to the track artist). Worth looking into.

Yeah, it sounds like a metadata problem.

It might be a metadata problem, though it would seem at little strange that it would not affect all apps the same way - Poweramp and Musicolet aren't affected; YT Music and Audify are to the extent that all albums appear twice, and Media Monkey is affected but not for all albums.  That said, I have had a quick look at the metadata for the tracks in a couple of the affected albums and there doesn't seem to be any variance in the album title or the album artist for any of them.

I've been bitten on the arse before by the two different tags being different. There's ID3v1 and ID3v2 and a file can have info in both and they can be different. You'd have to be very unlucky for all your music to be tagged the same kind of bad though, so probably not the issue in your case.

For purely stuff on the phone, look at BlackPlayer.

For "not really streaming", I use DSub.  I have a subsonic server on my local network with my albums and use this to sync the stuff I want on my android to then play them offline.

I think both were just a few ££ one time cost, and (imho) each worth the money over the freebies.

I use Pulsar. It's not good for casting mp3s from your phone though, so for that I use Hi-Fi Cast