{"id":50,"date":"2025-05-13T09:28:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-13T07:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/linuxundich.de\/en\/?p=50"},"modified":"2026-10-03T21:49:46","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T19:49:46","slug":"gramophone-a-modern-material-3-music-player-for-android","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/linuxundich.de\/en\/android\/gramophone-a-modern-material-3-music-player-for-android\/","title":{"rendered":"Gramophone: A modern Material 3 music player for Android"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Everyone has a Spotify<\/a> account these days, right? For many people, music streaming has become a given. But there are still a few holdouts who won’t be lured into the cloud. People who would rather keep their music locally on their computer or smartphone, stay in control of their files, and have no interest in ads, tracking, or subscriptions. I’m one of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the years, I’ve tried a lot of open-source music players on my Android<\/a> smartphone, with varying degrees of success. With Gramophone<\/a>, I’ve landed once again on an app that not only looks up to date, but also manages large music collections quickly and reliably. And it does so without any frills, trackers, or in-app purchases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Modern Design with Material You<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first thing you notice about Gramophone is the elegant design. The app follows Google’s current Material 3 Design<\/a> all the way, better known as \u201cMaterial You\u201d. If you run a recent Android 12 or newer, you get an interface with perfectly matched colors, including dynamic accent colors that adapt to your chosen wallpaper. That goes not only for the app itself, but also for the app icon, which blends into the system’s colors seamlessly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under the hood, Gramophone doesn’t rely on its own database. Instead, it uses Android’s MediaStore API<\/a> to make your music library available in a flash. That saves resources and also keeps access smooth, even with large collections. What I like less is the filtering by artist. Gramophone uses the ID3 tag \u201cArtist\u201d instead of \u201cAlbum Artist\u201d. The result: if your collection is cleanly tagged, you will find many artists listed multiple times because of duets or collaborations, for example in the form \u201cArtist1; Artist2; Artist3\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"Album\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
Album view<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Duplicate\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
Artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Player\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
Album player<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Player\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
Player<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Light\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
Light mode<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The full-text search lets you quickly filter for artists, albums, or individual songs. Especially handy: in the settings, you can define how Gramophone deals with very short audio files. By default, the app hides all files shorter than 60 seconds, such as ringtones or notification sounds, if anyone still uses those at all. You can set this filter to 0 under Three-dot menu<\/em> \u00bb Settings<\/em> \u00bb Behavior<\/em> [CHECK: UI labels] to show all files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If songs are still missing, take a look at Folder blacklist<\/em> [CHECK: UI label] as well. You may have excluded certain directories from the search. Sometimes a simple reboot of your phone helps, too, so that Android’s media scan picks up new files. For me, though, Gramophone has always added new songs to the collection automatically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyrics support and playlist feature<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Besides its simple controls, Gramophone also supports lyrics, as long as your music is tagged with synchronized lyrics. They show up right in the player, provided the metadata is there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Question:<\/strong> I haven’t been that diligent in this area so far. Does anyone know a tool that could automatically add lyrics like this to a larger collection of MP3s? I doubt it’s that easy, since copyright surely plays a role here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Playing existing playlists works too, but only in read-only mode for now. You can’t create your own playlists directly in the app yet. According to the developers, that might change in the future. For me it’s not much of a roadblock, though, because I see apps like Gramophone purely as players and don’t want to fiddle around with playlists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is still urgently missing, in my opinion, is support for Android Auto. There is already a bug report<\/a> for it, but the developer currently doesn’t have the time to tackle this feature. With Android Auto, I think the most important requirements for a modern music player on Android would be covered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Formats: What works and what doesn’t?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Since Gramophone is kept as lean as possible, the app relies on the codecs built into Android. That means support for more exotic formats depends heavily on the Android system and on the device itself. Here are a few rules of thumb:<\/p>\n\n\n\n