N7Player It’s not often that I come across an application that displaces a default choice on my phone within minutes of me downloading it, but the N7Player music player is just one such. I think it’s brilliant. Before I go on, let me make one thing clear: I’m an obsessive about album cover art. I go to great, some would say unhealthy …
The looks seem nice.
Would be nice if an App-of-the-Week review contained just a little bit of detail on the software beyond looks:
Does it use its own media scanning subsystem, playback subsystem, EQ subsystem etc, or does it rely on android's and solely focuses on fancy graphics?
Will it support M4A coverart, or be a total fail like PowerAmp in that regard?
It won't scan my mp3/flacs for embedded album art, instead it wants to download them.
If I use my built-in (HTC) music player first, flicking through each song, that will extract the art, after which n7player can see it. Presumably there's an app somewhere which will do that extraction automagically rather than me having to manually do it...
Thanks for the article.
You do have to wonder why a media player needs access to the phones unique ID, phone number, number of the person your calling and the ability to read the log files on the phone (which can include account information, URLs, application information, etc) along with full internet access. Fine the internet access on it's own is probably used to grab meta data. But one you include those other permission things start to feel a little too uncomfortable.
It's not really an attack against N7Player alone. A lot of Android apps now seem to require a lot more permissions than you would think necessary. I guess it's how you get payed for "free" apps.
I'll give this one a miss for the time being. Otherwise it looks very good.
I decided to not install it for the same reasons. I'm also pissed off by the way installed apps offer updates that have escalated permissions from their original installed settings. I'm considering rooting my phone so I can use a fine grained permissions control app.
Phone state also seems to be for detecting if you're on a call, in which case that could be used to switch off the music when the phone rings. Seems a poor choice of security granularity on the part of Android if that is the case. No idea why it needs access to the logs though, so I also decided not to try it.
Well, it says right there in the application description, "Reading sensitive log data permission is required only to provide more information in case of application crash when user decides to send log to developers." Of course, you have to trust that that is the real reason, but at least it is a reasonable explanation (especially for a beta). That probably accounts also for the internet permission.
I was just as suspicious, this is what my phone says this about the "Read Sensitive log Data" permission -
"...This allows it to discover general info about what you are doing with the phone, potentially including personal or private info."
Yes a lot of these apps are free, but what's the REAL cost?
This post has been deleted by its author
I own PowerAmp, and I boycott it, because the forum is "moderated" and out of 3 perfectly polite posts requesting a statement on M4A cover art support, NONE ever made it onto the forum.
One unrelated Post took 2 weeks before it finally was deigned to be allowed to show up on this so-called support forum. I will not deal with a company that treats their customers like this.
The forum is kept clean of any problems they don't have a good answer to, to avoid people from seeing any weak points.
PowerAmp still doesn't support cover art for iTunes M4A format properly, which is obviously better sound quality than MP3's, so for all its talking about high quality playback and using its own subsystems, rather than relying on Android, it needs to support M4A cover art. Matter of fact, there hasn't been a PowerAmp update in ages, its like they stopped working on it.
Android (up to version 2.3.x) does not support M4A cover art, even though it claims to have support for iTunes music.
On Android's bug tracker, this isn't even regarded a bug fix, but more like a feature request. Partly because a lot of people who failed to understand the problem posted ridiculous "workarounds" like "just convert your files to MP3" and other ideas that completely missed the (simple) point.
BTW, there was a guy who posted a small android utility, that does its own media scan, and then enters cover art links into android's database, which the android media scan fails to do.
This works to some degree, but you have to manually run it every time you add new M4A format music.
Note: there are a few players who take care of this, by using their own subsystem instead of Android's default library. So, if it works on your phone, does not mean the problem doesn't exist.
I tried to install this from the bar code and instantly got an SSL certificate failure "The site name does not match the site name in the certificate." The app is supposed to be downloaded from play.google.com but in fact according to the certificate (which has only been valid for a few days) is coming from googleusercontent.com
Is this legit?
So what if the UI is amazing? 99% of the time I use my phone to play music - it's either in a pocket, or tucked away in the car somewhere... so the UI is (largely) irrelevant to me apart from manipuating playlists
So, from where I sit, all the UI does is restrict the number of devices it'll run on - and yes, my phone isn't one of them, but I doubt I'd use it for the shiny shiny anyway if I'm honest.
Just my £0.02...
I was going to say -- is this a review of a music player, or of a cover art image slideshow tool? Hard to tell from the content, which includes barely a word about how the thing actually sounds -- might be more accurate to say that it's a great music player for people whose priorities are as screwy as those of the Reg hack who wrote the article.
Nothing screwy about it. It's my experience that sonically Android music players are much the same and that the real benefits are found by A) using a decent pair of 'phones, and B) having a comprehensive and competent sound modification suite. Point A is beyond the remit of this review, Point B is covered.
Also sound quality is subjective. I like the effects the N7Player's 'reverb' setting produces. Others may disagree.
If the sound the app produced was in anyway below standard, I wouldn't have rated it so highly.
The problem I have with all these metadata driven players is they all have a severe weakness: if your metadata is bad (incorrect or missing ID3 tags), they fall down. They all fail to take into account one of the most common, and useful, pieces of metadata that a music file can have: what directory it is in!
If one album is by "Paul McCartney & Wings" and one by "Paul McCartney and Wings", guess what - that's 2 artists! Nevermind they are under the same directory.
Or the case I ran into: I had 2 albums named "Greatest Hits" - one by Linda Ronstadt, one by the Little River Band. Guess what: even though they were in two separate directories, my phone's built-in player decided they were the same album.
So: does *this* music player (and, no matter how pretty this is, its main goal should be to play music, not ogle the album covers) have sense enough to work if the metadata isn't perfect?
This app has a pretty comprehensive ID3 tag editor as the review mentions and as I can testify to from a couple of hours use of this app - I could fix both of your "problems" in 30 sec flat using it to correct the meta data.
Don't know why there is such opposition to a music player app being elected on the basis of its UI. As the reviewer has mentioned they all sound kinda the same, what I want is an enjoyable browse through the 10GB of albums I have on my Sensation and it's gotta be said, this app does make browsing very easy and enjoyable.
indeed, same shocking music tastes as my EX! Paul bl**dy Simon, Simon and Garfunkel and Bob Dylan, oh memories I can not erase from my mind :'(
Also notice on the Screen Shot that Fleetwood Mac is listed twice, I have issues with Meta Driving music apps too, they drive me nuts when they break up albums into two or three groups because the data is incorrect for some unknown reason, it drives me mad, I would prefer the app to use the file directory, what was wrong with that, it was simple and WORKED?
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