VLC because i listen to midi and tracker music among other things and it's the only one i know that can play that
I also switched to local music collection recently. Earlier my to-go "player" was NewPipe but it became unusable for me :(
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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AIMP is pretty good. I'm not audiophile tho.
I use AIMP for my snobby lossless FLAC library.
i use it to play my offline files using smart playlists (all songs in rock or metal genre rated 4 stars or higher by me). it also has a view lyrics option that will either display the lyrics from the files' lyrics tag or search them in a lyrics search service. it's not free but i've more than gotten my money's worth out of it
Blackplayer EX is one of the few apps I've paid for. Used it for maybe 5 years now, well worth the price whatever it was.
Musicolet. it does everything I need for local mp3s. and SomaFM for streaming.
Poweramp. It's easy to navigate and lets you modify the tags like artist, album, track number, etc.
If you're on GrapheneOS, you can deny internet access and when your free trial runs out, just clear cache data and you can start your free trial over but that also deletes your playlists (but not the files).
I just bought the full version tho because it's the best music player ever.
My use case is "just play music from the same goddamn SD card folder you've been using since the early 2010s and have just been copying it over to new cards ever since", so VLC works quite well for me.
Musicolet because of the multiple queue feature
VLC
Just VLC. I don't stream music and most of the stuff I listen to have no lyrics so it works fine as-is
VLC has been great on graphene for a year or so but recently started having issues playing over bluetooth in my car. Tried a few open source options from FDroid but wound up going back to Omnia (Sandboxed play store) for now. No more playback issue for a few days now.
Seemed to happen when I got Graphene's Android 17 update, but I can't say for sure it was that. The issue I have with it currently is that playback audio cuts out in the car, but the screen still indicates it's "playing" - track time still ticking. I'd have to tap to pause and tap to resume to bring it back, and it would only last a few minutes before doing it again.
I think it's likely less VLC's fault and more likely an Android 17 thing.
The open source apps I tried worked a peach, but didn't let me use the car's (Honda) menu to browse music or select albums. Most of the ones I tried didn't even appear as options while trying to use the car to change what music I was listening to.
I've been enjoying fossify music player. My main issue is that the sorting is based on metadata, and not folder structure, but other than that, it's a solid music player.
It doesn't have any lyrics, though, which is not helpful for what you're looking for
I've recently switched from Phonograph_Plus to Fossify, and it's definitely a lot more stable if nothing else.
Auxio for local music, Morphe for YT and YT Music w/o ads. YTDLnis to download songs and videos.
Simpmusic, Kreate or vimusic for yourube music clients. I use simpmusic bc I think the ui is nice.
You might be interested in Rush, which detects music from your "now playing" and displays the lyrics beautifully. Then you can use whatever local player you like for your library and have great lyrics experience regardless.
If you end up setting up a home server with navidrome or similar, Chora has the best lyrics search and display. The website also mentions local playback, so it may meet your need, although I've never used it that way.
It's been a while since I've used a local player, but the best ones I've found were Oto Music (closed source), which has very good lyrics search and support, and Booming Music.
PixelPlayer also looks like a promising new option.
I tried rush, it's pretty cool. But I guess I will stick with PixelPlayerOSS. It can search the lyrics within the music player app itself. Which is awesome. The only thing about PixelPlayerOSS I dont like is that it doesn't have a good album view.
Pulsar+
Neatly ordering stuff how I want it to.
Metrolist , Riplay ,monochome
SicMu Neo
Vanilla Music
VLC
Booming Music worked the best for me. I tried Rhythm, but last time I used it, it slowed down my phone and drained the battery.
An issue that both have is that they don't read metadata of WAV files.
SicMu Player for local files
SimpMusic for streaming
both should be on f-droid
Foldplay, and it looks like it has a lyric option.
I use VLC on everything
Auxio
Musicolet
MUSICOLET RELEASE OR LET ME PAY FOR SOURCE CODE ACCESS AND MY LIFE IS YOURS!
Seriously tho even with gramophone being super close to perfect for me, musicolet just is perfect
Yeah it's been the best music player I've ever used for something like 10 years now
I self-host my music with Navidrome, play it with Tempus on Android.
Have you used Tempo? Is Tempus better in your opinion?
I have. Tempo is a bit abandoned. Tempus has momentum and android auto support.
Thank you! I'll try it out
I like Symfonium, don't know if it has lyrics search though
Foobar2000
Holy hell I thought you were joking - I didn't know there was an Android version of foobar!!
Poweramp is nice (and a paid application) but it's russian so it may not appeal to everyone.
Because of the spyware?
Only thing I've found that handles large libraries, it has it's own engine to index songs, whereas the Android one bugs out on large (5K+) libraries in my experience (a while ago). On gOS it recognized as paid if you left Play Store up for a week (couple years back now), has been fine ever since, even though I removed play store and Poweramp's network permissions.
I use Metro (link goes to f-droid) which does something with lyrics. I don't use that feature so I'm not sure if it searches for them or just displays them if they're embedded in the file.
Good player though, doesn't look like it escaped from the noughties. Local files only, no streaming.
Plexamp.
Pulsar+ for my local music library.
Qobuz for streaming.
PixelPlayer has lyrics search and is MaterialYou themed.
Yes, it does. But I dont like the album view in it.
After trying a few a settled with Metro on f-droid, I've seen a lyrics button or something but I've never tried to use it.
YT Music patched thru the Morphe app (new revanced)
I use Vanilla Music.
https://f-droid.org/packages/ch.blinkenlights.android.vanilla/
It's fine for my purposes. I don't know what functionality you're missing with these other programs, though, so hard to say if it meets your needs.
I want my music player to be able to search lyrics.
Native one in miui 🙄