PowerAMP for Android review

PowerAMP is a slick looking music player that is trying to corner the audiophile market. It has a lot to like about it and some things to dislike. It looks good, and it has some great features, but it still has work to be done.

To start off, PowerAMP can play audio files that the native Android player (and most third party music players) can't. The list of formats includes MP3 (of course), MP4, M4A, ALAC, OGG, WMA, FLAC, WAV, APE, WV and TTA. Most of those won't mean anything to many people, but this is good news for hardcore music geeks.

PowerAMP has four different desktop widgets (with album art and without), and two types of lock screen widgets. It's convenient to be able to play/pause and skip tracks (forward and back) without even having to unlock your phone. PowerAMP's lock screen widget is the best that I've used.

The player looks great; it has a few different themes you can choose from. And the many menu settings make it pretty customisable. The user interface is not super intuitive, and it's pretty easy to get lost in the menus while looking for a song (or artist). Sometimes the back button moves you up one level, and sometimes it exits out of the program. The app also needs a way to get you back to the main library page with a single click.

Another lack: no way to reorganise the music on your playlists. You can add and delete files to playlists, which is nice (and not included in all music players), but once they're in a list you can't change what order the list plays in. Adding that feature would be a no brainer.

The key to unlock the full version of this app costs £3 and can be found here.