The Music App

Android Default Music App

The Music app on Android is probably the most straightforward on the phone. That can be a good thing, but music player preferences are also highly personal. It’s not an iPod-like experience, but it's similarly straight-ahead and, for those who just want to hear an album, playlist, or set their tunes to shuffle, it gets the job done.

By default, Android can play MP3, Apple-style AAC, and Ogg Vorbis songs, and recognize the tags, or “metadata,” placed on them by most music stores and music organizers like iTunes. The app starts off in a view of all the artists of the music you’ve loaded onto your phone’s SD/microSD card, utilizing that metadata. Click an artist, and you’ll see the albums represented in your phone collection. If you’d rather see your music grouped by albums or songs, click one of the two middle tabs at the top. If there’s something playing, or recently playing, you can access it quickly by pressing the bottom bar with the song name.

Browsing album tracks.

Click through to check out the songs on an album, and the background will change to a stylized, black-and-white zoom from the album art--neat, eh? Press and hold on any song, and you’ll get options to play, add it to a playlist, delete it, or search for it--on YouTube, Pandora, on the web, or in other apps you’re using. There’s also a “Use as ringtone” option, but it’s quirky--your default ringtone is immediately set to that song, and there’s no way to edit the portion of the song used. If you’d like to turn music into ringtones, check out the RingDroid app.

The “Playlists” tab keeps a “Recently Added” playlist going by default, but you can create your own playlists by pressing and holding on a song, choosing “Add to playlist,” and choosing “New” when asked for the playlist. Some music-syncing desktop software, like Songbird or doubleTwist, can also create and manage your phone’s playlists through syncing.

When a song or playlist is playing, the Music app changes to a pretty simple interface. The buttons in the upper-right show your playlist, or turn on shuffle and repeat modes (from the top down). Album art and information are shown (and you can search any of them out by pressing and holding on them) three player buttons are offered for playing, pausing, and skipping back or forward, and you can “scrub” inside the song by dragging the slider bar or tapping along the timeline.

The Music player widget. 

At most any place in the Music app, you can hit your Menu button and choose “Party Shuffle” or “Shuffle All” to skip the playlist process. You can also minimize the player at any time with the Home button and your tunes will keep playing. You can get back to your Music app by pulling down the notification bar and clicking the entry it will keep there, or by adding a Music widget to your home screen and using its buttons. If you’ve got a playlist you particularly like, you can create a shortcut to it on your home screen, too, by pressing and holding, choosing Shortcuts, Music playlist, then picking the playlist you’d like to work into regular rotation.

Depending on your phone model, you may also have received headphones that have player control buttons on them; you can use these to control playback without having to turn the screen back on.

HTC and Motorola Music Apps

HTC Music App

Motorola's phones have a Music app that hews pretty closely to the stock Android app. HTC, as always, gives the Music player a new coat of paint, with some helpful new features added, too. You flip through albums as in iTunes' Cover Flow mode--that is, as if you were flipping through a horizontal CD rack. From the Menu button, you can do all the same things as in the stock Music app, but also Share a track through your Bluetooth connection. That's mostly helpful for sending a song to a laptop computer with Bluetooth connectivity, but it's a bit slower than your USB cable, too. The Music widget is also a bit more flashy, and fits in with HTC's general widget style.

The Amazon MP3 Store

Amazon MP3 Store

Need to bolster your music selection on your phone? Most Android phones come with an Amazon MP3 store pre-installed, and it’s available in the Market for phones that lack one. Amazon’s MP3s are a smart fit for Android phones--you can copy them to, and play them on, as many devices as you’d like, and songs and albums are generally a bit cheaper than through Apple’s iTunes Store. It’s fairly simple to use, too.

On the main screen, you’ll see a search box, links to the lists of bestselling albums, songs, and genre charts, links to the free MP3 song of the day, and the album deal. Click the orange “Free” button to grab that free song, or hit the orange price tag on the album and it turns into a green “Buy,” with one more click to actually purchase the album.

MP3 store main screen

Amazon’s MP3s each offer a 30-second preview, which you can listen to in the view of any album or song list by clicking on the album art in the left-hand column or the song name. Clicking the price on the right brings up another “Buy” button.

Album Details

Pressing the Menu button at any time gives you some basic options--head back Home, make a Search, see your Downloads, or get Help. If you don’t have an Amazon account (and if not, hey, welcome back from Siberia), you can sign up for one through this Amazon MP3 store.