Another great app to play offline music is BlackPlayer Music Player (quite a mouthful, isn’t it?). It is at par with GoneMAD, and thanks to its brilliant features, has a highly customizable interface. On top of that, it also supports almost all the available audio formats, including FLAC. So, in case you are torn between both the music players, we’ll make it easy for you. In this post, we pit these apps against each other and see how they stack up.
App Size
The free version of BlackPlayer contains ads and measures roughly around 21-23MB. BlackPlayer EX is its paid version that removes ads and offers a ton of features for $0.99. Download BlackPlayer Music Player While GoneMAD (Trial) is relatively lightweight at about 15MB. The trial period runs for 14 days, and you will have to pay $2.99 to unlock the full version. Download GoneMAD Music Player
Design & Interface
The BlackPlayer’s design and the interface are minimalistic as it keeps only the necessary features on the home screen. True to its name, it sports a black interface with a tabbed layout and a sleek navigation bar at the top. Needless to say, the black UI looks incredible, especially on AMOLED displays. The tabbed layout gives the player a classy look, and the gestures make navigation like a walk in the park. All you have to do is swipe horizontally to navigate through the tabs. So, even if you have a phone with a tall display, these gestures make it extremely easy for using it single-handedly. Plus, the search icon is right at the top of the screen meaning that you can search for the song directly from the same screen. The feature which I loved about the BlackPlayer is the Most Played option on the left menu. It displays the top five songs that you frequently listen to. However, you can change this number as per your liking. Meanwhile, GoneMAD’s design is inspired from Google’s Material Design. That’s why it is themed in blue and white. Similar to BlackPlayer, it lets you swipe horizontally through the tabs at the top. The other notable difference on GoneMAD is that instead of having a tabbed preview, you get the songs and albums arranged in a list. That ultimately ends up making it appear like other music players. In a nutshell, the looks aren’t enough to set it apart from the other apps. A specific issue I faced was that I had to tap on the left menu every time I wanted to search for a song. It’s cumbersome if you have to do that often. The top bar of the GoneMAD has only the Sorting option. At the end of the day, if I were to pick a music player solely by design, I will side with BlackPlayer for its clever, minimalistic, and an eye-pleasing presentation. Also, because it gives me the tabbed layout and the elegant transition effects.
Equalizer Support
BlackPlayer comes with a built-in 5-band equalizer and 10 amazing presets. Depending on your music preferences you can always build your custom presets. There’s an additional tab for Sound Effects which lets you customize your music experience even further. This app has features like bass boost, virtualizer, and a sound amplifier (depends on your phone’s hardware). On the other hand, GoneMAD features a 12-band equalizer and 16 presets. Additionally, this app also offers features like DSP limiter, Audio Pitch correction, and Bass Boost. You can customize the presets and save the settings as per your audio preferences.
Playlists Modification
Naturally, both the music players support playlists. It’s a basic feature of any music player, and both do it beautifully. GoneMAD follows the conventional method of creating an empty playlist first and then adds the songs. Though it also lets you create playlists on the go, and I found this method more streamlined and easy to manage. Plus, it also has a neat folder called Smart which is a collection of three auto-curated playlists (Most Played, Recently Added, and Recently Played). Similarly, BlackPlayer also lets you make a playlist using Recently Added and Most Played. Instead of having the ‘smart’ feature, BlackPlayer puts both in separate tabs within the Playlist folder. Adding tracks or modifying a playlist is as easy as pie in both the apps. Another difference is that the BlackPlayer lets you import playlists. It currently supports the m3u and .m3u8 formats. All you need to do is tap on the Import button (on the Playlist page) and select the relevant files. GoneMAD lacks this feature, and the app’s developers plan to offer it in the future.
Lyrics: Online or Offline?
Singing out the lyrics of a song is an altogether different experience. And I bet, searching for lyrics on Google can sometimes be an annoying affair. Though both the players support embedded lyrics, the situation is a tad different if a song doesn’t have them. In the case of GoneMAD, it lets you display lyrics via a third-party app like MusixMatch. So, you will have to download it and if needed, edit the tags of the song. Once done, tapping on Show Lyrics will display the wordings automatically. BlackPlayer doesn’t pull lyrics from the web, and most probably won’t ever in the future due to licensing issues. Instead, you’ll have to search for the lyrics on Google, and then manually copy the text and paste it on the Lyrics window in the app. The manual process of adding lyrics may seem off-putting, but that’s the only way to view them in BlackPlayer for now. Or else, you can take the help of a third-party lyrics app.
Extra Features
There’s a long list of common features between the two apps such as Sleep Timer, Cross Fade, Tag Editing, customizing Album Cover, etc. A few distinctive features include GoneMAD’s Bookmark (saving the position of a song), Jump to Time, and Rate. And they are easily accessible through the three-dot menu of a song. If GoneMAD lets you bookmark a particular song, BlackPlayer goes a step ahead and allows you to mark songs as favorites. However, the feature I loved about both the apps is that you can update the Album art of the songs. I don’t like to have empty album covers, and this feature fills up that gap beautifully. Sometimes you may have to edit the tags before you hit the auto download button. Nevertheless, that extra effort is worth it. The album art accentuates any music players’ looks if you ask me. The process of updating the album art is more or less similar in both the apps. My only gripe with BlackPlayer is that its three-dot menu is under-utilized and could provide a few additional options.
Customization
Who doesn’t like to change the look and style of a music player? With BlackPlayer, you can even change the font if you don’t like the default one. You can also enable or disable the Gapless effect along with countless other options like including a navigation bar or adding/removing folders from the left menu. If you think customizing BlackPlayer is overwhelming, prepare to be thrown off your feet with GoneMAD’s over 250 customization options. You can tweak almost every aspect of it. From modifying the scan paths and selecting the default path of playlists to enabling seek buttons — GoneMAD lets you play the customization game to the fullest. Interestingly, BlackPlayer also has an added feature named Quick Action for gestures, but the options are limited.
Themes
When it comes to themes, GoneMAD lets you play around a lot. The variety of themes includes design families ranging from Classic to Material Design. So, even if the app doesn’t have a dedicated Light or Dark theme, you can make use of the Material Design’s presets and build a custom theme accordingly. As far as the BlackPlayer is concerned, I suppose it would be unfair compare since it provides a white or light interface only. The whole point would be lost, right? Well, the app does allow you to switch to the Light mode. However, it’s available only in the paid version.
And the Winner Is
Now, time for the ultimate question — which is the better music player? Well, if you want a fuss-free and easy-to-manage music player with a minimalist-like approach, then BlackPlayer is the answer. But if you are someone who would love to have a bunch of features readily available on a flick of a button, then GoneMAD is the winner. Though the stock design isn’t impressive enough, it makes it up with its superb configurable options and fantastic equalizer settings. So, if you love tweaking your apps (the heart and soul of Android, right), GoneMAD will surely find a way to your heart through your ears. The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.
