If you’ve ever gone looking for a new music player for your Android smartphone or tablet, you’ll know that the Google Play Store is cluttered with hundreds upon hundreds of apps in that category. Less than half of them are worth your taps, and less than half of those are worth the price they ask for. Orpheus Music Player, however, is worth every single cent of the 99 cents you’ll pay for it, and then some!

Orpheus is built upon the ever-popular open source music player Apollo, which was written by Andrew Neal and is commonly found in CyanogenMod and other ROMs. Written and designed by Andrew Boren and Andrew Sutherland of OpenSilk Productions, Orpheus relies heavily upon good, clean coding to keep everything running smoothly under the hood. After testing it for about three weeks, I’ve found that Orpheus launches quickly and almost never lags.

Developer Andrew Sutherland came up with the idea for Orpheus Music Player when he grew tired of waiting for Apollo to update its outdated Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich interface. The style of the app is based upon Google Play Music, using similar visual “cards” to display artists, albums, songs, and genres. You can simply swipe left and right to switch between panes that display the aforementioned cards. Orpheus will feel very familiar when you dive into it if you’ve had any experience with Play Music or Apollo, making a transition from one of those apps to Orpheus both easy and painless.

Orpheus is incredibly feature-rich, especially when compared to the asking price. Chromecast support is baked right in, allowing you to cast whatever music you’d like from your device directly to your TV. This feature is one that is a huge asset to Orpheus, and a feature that Play Music locks down to only music purchased from the Play Store. All that music you uploaded to your personal collection on Play Music? As of this writing, you can’t cast it to the Chromecast. If it’s on your device, though, Orpheus has you covered.

Orpheus has a Muzei wallpaper extension that displays the album art of the song playing as the device’s background. Similarly, daydream mode is available and will also feature the album art of the song playing, which is a nice touch for users who like to dock their device and use it as a desktop music player and clock. Another key feature is that Orpheus is fully supported on both phones and tablets. Many music players lack this level of support, and simply stretch out their UI to fit the tablet screen. This leads to some really strange looking tablet interfaces that aren’t nearly as flattering as Orpheus’ 10 themes, 5 of which are light and 5 of which are dark.

One feature that I adore is the playback visualization, which allows me to watch the beat of the music flash by while I’m listening. I can only hope that a full screen visualizer is in the works, as it’d be a welcome addition! The visualizer doesn’t count if you’re streaming to the Chromecast, though, as there’s a bit of lag between the music playing over the TV and the visualization that you’re seeing on the device. That’s to be expected, though.

Orpheus Music Player is a fantastic replacement for the local music player that comes standard on most Android devices. Personally, I’d love to see Orpheus become the new pre-installed music player of choice instead of each manufacturer’s awful music players. Orpheus is easily a 5-star app.

You can buy Orpheus Music Player for $0.99 USD at the Google Play Store.

There’s also a Google+ Community dedicated to Orpheus support that’s run directly by the developers at OpenSilk Productions if you encounter any bugs or need assistance.

Be sure to leave a review for Orpheus Music Player on the Play Store if you like what the developers have done!