Music app for Android-- listen and import ripped MP3 files?

March 18, 2020 12:12 PM

I have a lot of great music on CDs, and I want to listen to it on my phone. What is a good app for an Android phone? Both for listening, managing the music, and importing the MP3 files from a computer? I have a Google Pixel 3 phone.

So far I have just been using Youtube Listen, and Pandora, but I am increasingly unhappy with their choice of music for me and their seemingly decreasing number of songs. I want to listen to my music that I have been collecting for 30 years. Some of it I have already ripped from the CDs, and some I will rip if I can find a good app to manage the files and listen to it on my phone.

Android OS, Pixel 3 phone. Don't care at all about streaming music. I want to listen to my own music, stored offline on my own phone. Can you even do this today? Thank you for any help and advice you can give.

posted by seasparrow to Technology (9 answers total)

Best answer: Rocket Music Player works for me. I don't do cloud music
posted by scruss at 1:11 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: PowerAmp has been my player for a long time. It only has custom playlists you can import/export rather than any more-fancy tagged lists or rule-derived playlists.

Can you even do this today? I buy handsets specifically for their micro-SD card expansion and have jumped from 64 GB to 400GB in the last year -- causing a problem in itself because ideally I'd play songs on shuffle within an album that's been randomly-selected from the albums with the lowest play count. I get by without the playcount thing (i.e. I can't listen to everything evenly).

My workflow is to have the CD's ripped and at rest with good metadata on a computer before dropping them onto a folder on the phone. My ripping programs have varied over the years but the same Title Artist main folder / Recording Name subfolder structure has been enough along with player using the tags embedded in the files themselves.
posted by k3ninho at 1:14 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: You can rip the CDs with one of many programs out there — I think I used CDBurnerXP or something last I did it. With a little finagling you should be able to pop them out into MP3 or MP4 format pretty easily.

After that, PowerAmp is a good option, but even as an offline person I would suggest using Google Music. It's basically a free online backup of your own files (up to 20,000 I think) that you can access from anywhere if you want or store offline on your phone album by album or playlist by playlist. It's really very convenient and I'm not a streaming type person at all.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 1:40 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: If you are pushing music from a Windows computer to any phone, I recommend MediaMonkey, which you install on the computer and not the phone. I can't be sure it rips CDs and I don't have an Android app suggestion to play the music, though. Make sure the Media Type on the mp3 file is set to Music, which you can do inside MediaMonkey.
posted by soelo at 2:03 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: If you organize your music collection manually, I can't think of anything better than VLC.
posted by quarterframer at 3:06 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I use Pulsar Music Player. It was the first one I found that made it easy to do the directories of files sort of thing.
posted by zengargoyle at 4:30 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I recommend either Poweramp or Pulsar as well. I have a 128 microSD card on my phone, a Sony, but I don't think the Pixel has a microSD slot. I use MusicBee, a Windows program, to manage my music and then sync it with the phone.
posted by Leontine at 8:00 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: My favorite Android music player is Music Folder Player because it of how it handles the way I've been curating my music collection for 25 years. I organize them as folders. Genre \ artist \ album \ (bunch of mp3 files with the leading-zero track number and songname). That's how I've always organized my tunes on my various PCs over the years.

All I do to change what tunes are on my phone is connect it to a PC, enable file transfer on the phone, then open Windows Explorer. Then I can delete files from and copy files to the phone's Music folder.

When I open up Music Folder Player later on the phone, I just go pick whatever album I want to listen to but navigating through my folder tree. If I start in on track 01 in an album folder, it plays the whole album.

If you're familiar with how WinAmp worked with folders on PC, Music Folder Player is similar. I used the free version for a while and eventually upgraded to the premium version and have no regrets.
posted by glonous keming at 8:13 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you for all of the advice! I am continually surprised by the intelligence and goodwill of most Mefites. You have given me a lot to think about and experiment with. I am going to try a few different recommendations (maybe all of them) and I'll report back which one worked out best for me.
posted by seasparrow at 10:48 AM on March 21, 2020