Never been Appier

So, the initial attempt at a non-gaming post then.

So after gaming then, my main passion in life is probably music, and as such I'm rarely seen out and about without my headphones (Coloud, Marvel licenced 'The Punisher' headphones, natch) permanently throned upon my colossal dome. For the last few years I've been enjoying the company of an old Sony Walkman something-or-other, with a 16gb capacity and trusty physical, actual buttons for navigating the interface, but as the headphone jack socket started to give out, I decided to upgrade to the Samsung Galaxy Player 50, pictured atop this very page beneath the title.

The Galaxy Player 50 is essentially to the Samsung Galaxy smartphone what the iPod Touch is to the iPhone, all the bells and whistles without the obligation to attempt a social life. As does it's parent, the Player runs on the Android OS, albeit a very basic version of it, can connect to the Internet via Wifi, and it's 16gb memory is easily expandable with a microSD card. I have equipped it with a 32gb card, bolstering the overall memory to 48gb. But that's not what this is about, no.

My point is that the old player had a little above 1800 tracks on it, all hand picked favourites from my own CD collection, and as absurd as it sounds, such a small amount of songs had gotten a little boring and predictable, so I decided to make use of my new-found capacity by loading full albums onto it, along with a whole bunch of new music, and before I knew it my play list had hit the 9000 song mark, and the Galaxy Player's built in music player had become sluggish under all that weight. When I attempted to search for a particular album or artist, the thing just died on me. So I decided to check the Android Marketplace for a solution, and came across an App called PowerAMP.

The app acts as a secondary music player, and is just what I needed. It not only has a more user-friendly interface than the built in player, but it's also a lot faster and more responsive. The website boasts that the app can scan 1000 tracks a second when you search a folder, and even on such a basic version of Android it was right on the ball when timed. Not only that you can filter by album, artist, title, genre, whatever at ease, and add tracks to the now-playing list instantly.

But wait, there's more. Swiping the displayed album art skips the track back or forth, which is surprisingly a lot easier than pressing the skip button on the touch screen. Not got the album art? Sorted. PowerAMP will download it for you as you listen, and can be set to only do this over Wifi so as not to ramp up those pesky data charges for Android smartphone users. It will also pause and resume a track when the headphone jack is removed/inserted, so you don't miss a second of the music, handy for lengthy podcasts and such. And the app comes with four slick visual themes to suit your mood, each in turn cooler than the default Galaxy music player.

For any Android device used as a music player, I'd call this app essential. I love it and I've only had it a few days. There's a 15 day free trial and then it's $4.99 to buy, a bit over £3 in real money, so it's great value for money too. Check it out at the official website here.