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10 best music apps and tools to maximize your listening experience
We already have lists for music streaming and music player apps. However, there are other types of music apps out there. There are apps that help you organize your physical collection, find lyrics, identify songs, and even convert playlists from one streaming service to another. With so many ways to interact with music, we wanted to do another list with some extra apps that may be a little more fun in a different sort of way. Here are the best music apps for Android.
The best music apps for Android
Audiomack
Price: Free / $4.99 per month
Audiomack is a music discovery tool. It has a ton of mixtapes, albums, singles, and other music from a variety of genres, including Afropop, Reggae, R&B, rap, hip-hop, and others. You can stream the music all you want to or download it for your personal listening. The free version has online streaming with advertisements or you can get everything ad-free for $4.99 per month. That’s actually fairly competitive. Other apps in this space include Reverbnation and SoundCloud. It’s a music streaming app. However, it focuses on the indie side of things rather than the most mainstream music you can find.
Change Playlist Image
Price: Free
Change Playlist Image is a simple app for Spotify users. You log into your Spotify with the app and then you can change up your playlists. It lets you change the playlist name, description, and playlist image. These changes are reflected in the actual Spotify app. This is one of many Spotify management apps, but we like this one for its simplicity and for filling in a gap within the app itself. Those who miss Spotify’s widget can try this app as well.
CLZ Music
Price: Free trial / $14.99 per year
CLZ Music is an organizational app for your physical media. You can index and categorize your CDs and records in order to keep track of everything you own. Additionally, you can scan barcodes for faster organization and sync your collection between devices. Additionally, you can search for stuff by its Catalog Number or by name with the app’s database. The price seems high, but it’s on a per-year basis rather than per month so it’s rather reasonable. Discogs is another excellent app in this space, although Discogs is mostly just for vinyl records.
Google Assistant
Price: Free
Google Assistant is a bit of a homer pick, but it’s honestly great for music fans. You can search for things like lyrics and Assistant can also find YouTube videos or play songs and playlists on a variety of streaming services. However, we’re putting it here for its music recognition. You can ask Google Assistant to identify a song and it’ll usually do a good job with it. It gives you quick access to all of the music information on the Internet and that makes it a handy tool.
MediaMonkey
Price: Free / $2.49
MediaMonkey is a local music player but it does a lot more than that. There is also a desktop variant available for Windows and the two work together very much like iTunes used to. You can manage your library on the computer and sync it to your device. It works over a cable like you would expect or you can set up the app to sync over WiFi as well.
The WiFi sync works fairly well although it hiccups a bit with larger collections. However, if you want a mobile and desktop experience for your music and you want them to work together, MediaMonkey is probably your best bet.
Musixmatch
Price: Free / $3.99 per month / $35.99 per year
Musixmatch is a lyrics app and it’s one of the few left that works pretty well. It supports a variety of streaming services with a floating bar that shows you lyrics to songs you’re listening to. Additionally, it has offline lyrics, YouTube support, support for Wear OS, and Chromecast support. It ticks a lot of other boxes as well. The big complaint with this one is the advertising. Musixmatch has some of the most obnoxious ads we’ve seen on a music app. You can pay a subscription to remove them and we wish that subscription was a bit cheaper, but those are the breaks. It’s otherwise quite good.
See also: The best karaoke apps for Android
Playlistmania
Price: Free
Playlistmania is our dark horse choice for this list. It’s relatively new and can do a bunch of neat things with your music. The premise is fairly simple. It wants to help you add new playlists by converting playlists from other sources into your music player. Unfortunately, it only has direct support for Deezer and Spotify as of the time of this writing. However, we expect that list to grow over time. You can also share playlists and add your own playlists. It’s a neat idea and we hope the app gets support for more music streaming services.
Plexamp
Price: Free / $0.99 / $3.99 per month
Plexamp is probably your best option for streaming your local music to your phone without a streaming service. It’s a bit complicated to set up. You create the server on your computer and then stream the content from your computer to your phone. From there, you can stream music, movies, TV shows, audiobooks, and other media content with traditional Plex. Plexamp focuses only on music.
The app also includes Chromecast support along with direct support for TIDAL’s HiFi subscription for you audiophiles out there. Subsonic and Google Play Music (until Google kills it in late 2020) are also decent options for this kind of stuff, but Plex easily does it better than its competitors.
See also: The best musician apps for Android
Shazam
Price: Free
Shazam is one of those apps that received most of its popularity in the old days. However, it’s still useful for music fans today. It works kind of like Musixmatch. You use the app to identify the song you’re currently listening to. However, the app also includes lyrics, related tracks (for discovery purposes), and the streaming services where the song is available. That last feature is a bit unnecessary since everything is basically available everywhere these days, but we like the thought. The app includes direct Apple Music and Spotify support along with an offline mode as well. It’s free, so we like it a bit more than Musixmatch, but the two both do a pretty good job.
YouTube Music
Price: Free / $9.99 per month
YouTube Music is a surprisingly powerful music streaming service. You get all of the benefits of a streaming service while also getting all of the benefits of YouTube. You can listen to music, watch the music video, or even listen to local music as well. The app gives you the usual streaming service features like discovery features as well as offline downloads and all of that. However, we really like the mixture of music and video content along with a solid, if bare-bones local music player. Google Play Music still does it better, but YouTube Music is replacing Google Play Music eventually so we better get used to it now.
See also: YouTube Music vs Spotify: Can Google even compete?
If we missed any great music apps, tell us about them in the comments! You can also click here to check out our latest Android app and game lists!
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