So now that I’ve offloaded my troublesome thoughts of the evening, let’s try a real post with some lighter fare, my new plan for playing MP3 Music, that involves my phone.

So as you recall my Zune is no more, thanks to part my stupidity and part some worthless human being. Rather than invest in a new Zune, which is stupid considering it’s a dying platform, or invest in a new player because that is frankly expensive, I opted to try something slightly different, something I could have done before, but never really thought it to be something I could gel with. I decided to use my phone.

Android has been capable of playing MP3 music from pretty much day one. But I imagine the reason most people didn’t use their phones as players was they had a hard enough time being just phones, adding the player part killed the use of everything else, and because people were still used to having a separate device for everything. When I first bought a smartphone, I couldn’t see the vanity in having so many functions under one device. Bill Gates wrote pages in that book of his back in the 90s about how phones would do all these things and more, and it didn’t seem like something I could fathom until I got one for myself. Now you’ll tell me that Apple wrote the book on MP3 players, and they probably did. Android wasn’t making it as a viable music platform because the iPod was already doing it, but what is the difference between an iPhone and an iPod Touch? Only the cell radio. iOS being what it is is exactly the same on a Touch as it is on their phone. So it stands to reason that Android could do the same thing, make devices with Android on it, without cell radios, that acted as MP3 players. The problem is Android is open. So open that there are literally over a dozen different apps out there in which to play music off your Android device. The one thing I give credit for with Apple is they picked a system and stuck to it. The downside to that system is it’s very closed and tight. That can be good and bad, but people like options, they like being able to do what they want with their device, I like being able to have complete control over my device. That is why I’m an Android user. It’s all about customization and pushing the device to it’s last breath, readers familiar with my old Samsung Moment might’ve heard the stories.

So my decision was to either buy a Samsung Galaxy Player, or buy a 32GB microSD card and load music on it, and push it through my Galaxy S2 phone.

I won’t lie, if I had the money to throw out there I would buy the Player. It’s essentially a Galaxy S/S2 without cell and probably a Samsung-flavor music app, but the fact that I’d own a real piece of an emerging Android music player market would have been super cool. But money is money, I’m not made of 199+ dollars for such a device. A 32GB microSD card was $30 on Newegg and with awesome shipping I ordered it at noon and got it the next morning. I now had two tasks ahead of me. A: Loading the music on the card, and B: Finding a player that will suit my needs.

The first step was easy. Along with the card I bought a cheap $10 card reader that included direct support for microSD without an SD adapter. I went with a Sandisk Class 4 32GB microSD card, after reading that some folks had trouble with Class 10 cards in the Galaxy S2. Frankly, it doesn’t make much of a difference to the device, only when copying files to it. You’ll get about 4.00MB/s transfer on your PC. Even still, I read a Class 4 should be sufficient for your uses, anything less might see a hit depending on your usage. I packed a little over half of the card with various music using Windows drag-and-drop. It brought back memories of my old Creative Zen, and frankly, I love this method. I hate library management and all that software garbage, give me a USB option and I am set. It also helps me preserve folder structure, because I am OCD about that.

The second required a little research. Given that I am using the Galaxy S2, I had to dig in a little on what type of hardware limitations I might have to worry about. The major one is that the GSII uses Yamaha audio hardware, which the internet regards to be inferior to the original Galaxy S’ Wolfson DAC. I couldn’t tell what was on the Galaxy Player but chances are it might be similar. I also believe Apple uses Wolfson. Honestly, this doesn’t bother me too much, as I’ve listened to music on my phone before and it’s not bad. A decent app with EQ settings could likely fix this, so I started shopping around for apps to use. Several offerings came out, among them were Winamp, Songbird, Poweramp and Rockbox.

Winamp and Songbird are very similar in how they are laid out, function, and work. They both have lock screen controls so you can flip on, change song, and flip off, and even the sliders and library functions are mostly the same. The only real differences I saw was Winamp has some additional features like syncing to Winamp on a PC, and Songbird uses some Facebook integration to “Like” music you play on Facebook. For EQ settings though, Winamp requires you upgrade to Pro, and Songbird lacks it altogether.

PowerAmp however, is really a very slick app for music. Not only does it offer all of the above, but it provides better library tuning, album art options, and a full EQ. The sound coming out my headphones was pretty good and it uses a finger-slide interface for changing songs similar to a Zune, which I am used to. The only downside is that once the trial ends, I’d have to put up $5 bucks for it.

The last one is Rockbox. Rockbox’s Android app is actually experimental, and not even on Market yet. Most of it is finished, but it’s still very much a work-in-progress. The UI isn’t very pretty, and its library and database functions tend to pick up files you don’t want, like WAVs for the GPS and other nonsense. But it does include EQ controls and sounds pretty nice. This is something I might be keeping my eye on for their final release, because assuming they spice up the UI a bit and add some Android-relevant features, it looks like it could go up against PowerAmp.

So in the end, I will likely be using PowerAmp for this project. I honestly believe the $5 is worth it for not only the program’s features but for the use of EQ controls for playback, it really makes or breaks the music player experience, especially with headphones.

Overall, I am feeling pretty good about this. My usage of an MP3 player was always low anyway, and half of the reason I got a Zune was because I had gift money towards it and my girlfriend loved hers, so I thought I’d check it out. There really wasn’t anything wrong with it, other than the software to load songs on it. Having my music and phone along with my other web apps on one device though makes it much easier to carry one device for it all, and I think that was the grand design from the start. The other bonus is when I am sick of my library, I can switch to Pandora, Digitally Imported, or other apps for radio and music and stream that over 3G/4G into my car stereo on the same FM adapter. If I end up not liking it, I buy another MP3 player with microSD support and shove the card in it. Done.

I think it’ll work out though. Now to figure out playlists…