Encore Music: an Open Source, Extendable Music Player

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Streaming services have become a convenient and popular way to enjoy the latest music on the go. Unfortunately, using such a service means you need to use multiple apps if you want to keep your local music separate, or that you have to settle with the service’s official app even if it lacks features you want.

Developed by Fastboot Mobile with XDA’s own Senior Recognized Developer XpLoDWilD as the lead developer and visionary, Encore Music aims to solve this problem. You can have the best of both worlds in a single app. Your online and local music will be in one place, and you can even seamlessly switch between them and mix both in your playlists.

Encore Music doesn’t stop there, though: it’s a fully fledged music player. Traditional playlists are easy to create, modify and reorder — but what if you just want to play some music quickly? Automix will let you create static playlists or a dynamic, infinite bucket of tracks. You can tweak its settings by selecting the specific styles or moods you feel like listening to. Want even more control? Tell Encore you want songs with little speech in them, or a high level of energy. Want something familiar instead? You can do that too!

That’s not all: the Recognition tab will let you recognize music playing on the radio, TV, in concerts or even music you hum. You can then search your library for the match and play it. It’s an alternate and easy way to search, one that’s pretty useful when you know that song but just can’t remember its title.

We’re still not done yet… Want to sing along your favorite songs? The Lyrics tab will let you do that, thanks to the ChartLyrics integration. What about keeping track of recently played music? Just go to the History tab to replay the songs you enjoyed earlier. Fancy listening to your music on another device? Encore Music can cast your music to any compatible cast receiver like Chromecast. Audio effects? Yup, that’s also supported: a bass booster is included by default, and you can install the DSP Suite plug-in from the Google Play store to use the equalizer and more effects.

On the subject of plug-ins… that’s probably the best part of Encore Music. It’s extensible via plug-ins other developers can create using the Encore Provider Library. Two types exist: music sources, which add support for streaming providers or services, and sound processing plug-ins for audio effects. To add online music streaming services, the Spotify and Google Play Music plug-ins are already available, with more coming on the way. The latter is paid and you can choose to buy it for a dollar if you think it’s worth it.

Did we mention Drive Mode? As the name indicates, it’s made with driving in mind and lets you control your music via gestures and voice. Swipe to the left or right to switch trackers, or tap to pause or resume. For more complicated tasks like playing a particular song or a playlist, you can use voice commands. Don’t know the way and need the Maps app? Just swipe up to go there. A floating album art will let you easily switch back to Drive Mode when you’re done.

Encore Music is free, ad-free and open source. There are no analytics or tracking libraries, and it respects your privacy by only using the Internet for what it needs to play your music. You can check the Encore Music GitHub repo for the source code, or just go to the Encore Music forum thread to try it out. There’s also a dedicated Encore Music forum in the XDA Community Apps section should you need any support, or if you’d like to discuss features or report bugs.