The stock media player in Android is somewhat notorious and because of that the market is flooded with alternatives. Now another player steps in, DoubleTwist. After using it a couple of days I decided to make a little summary…

Default view

Frist impression: This app looks good! Clean interface with smooth graphics which is a whole lot better than the stock one.

Neat play view

When it comes to features it’s not much to say, it will play your music, videos and podcast and has the standard sorting of Artists, Albums, Songs and Playlists. Note for all of you that has been dying to get an equalizer…keep on waiting. DoubleTwist doesn’t really bring anything new to the table and lacks some features that can be found in other players (last.fm, internet radio and so on). The two things that I miss the most though is a Widget (if I didn’t use widgets I could’ve gotten an iPhone) and decent edit/create playlist functionality. If I’m to summarize it in one sentence it would be that it does what I expect of a standard media player, but it does so looking good.

A quick update gave us the option to disable the headset controls which is good, if you’re using different audio apps for different purposes the lack of such option could make DoubleTwist start playing over your Google Listen podcast for example. Other than that the only option is “Enable automatic massstorage”. Not a lot of flexibility but on the other hand I can’t think of other options that I feel is a must have.

This is a early version of the player and that will sometimes show…many users have reported issues with it not reading the music on the device properly. Missing parts of tags, not finding all files in an album etcetera. I haven’t had any such problems, it even handles Swedish letters properly which the stock player doesn’t always do. Overall this is a neat start but future development is what will decide if this is a new Android favorite or just another player among many. I’m looking forward to see how it goes, especially when it competes with the updated stock player.

Part two, the Desktop version and the wish to give you an “Apple Experience” but with Android

DoubleTwist comes in a desktop version as well, for both Windows and Mac (Linux is not supported…so far). This player has great synchronizing abilities with loads of devices. The aim is obviously to free you from iTunes and WMP. You can sync music, pictures, movies, podcasts and even search the Android Market from inside of your media player. This is all good ideas! Unfortunately the player has a looong way to go before being an option to iTunes or even any other media player. A part from the sync abilities it’s not that good. Serious problems reading ID3 tags properly (almost half of my library was missing parts or all information and believe me, I keep those tags in pedantic order), no ability to view or edit file information, no ability to collect album art and an interface that is actually less appealing than it’s Android counterpart. Did I mention I had to install it as an admin in Win7, and run it as one each time? Otherwise it won’t sync with my Nexus1. No, my computer will continue running songbird. I can’t sync pictures, movies and podcasts (though I guess podcasts is coming up sooner rather than later). On the other hand synchronizing music is also hard when the library doesn’t perform good enough to even show all your songs.

DoubleTwist library when I search for "abra"

Exactly the same search and library but in Songbird instead