My apologies if this seems like an advertisement, I am simply a very grateful user of this project who cannot donate at this time but at least wants to share it with others.
SimpMusic is a Youtube Music front-end similar to ViMusic (or its fork, RiMusic), as such it is not a local music player, but it takes music from Youtube and plays it in an interface similar to Spotify but with its differences.
To give a brief introduction of the app, I summarized the functions that I find most interesting:
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The app has the ability to download music but usually if you listen to any song it is saved as a cache, so you don’t need to download it.
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The app allows you to see and listen to all the songs in the album of the song you are listening to, and sometimes even includes history and descriptions of that album.
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The app provides lyrics for most songs using MusicMatch, which are also stored on your device if you have already listened to the song.
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The app has Sponsorblock support so if your song has filler parts, you can remove them using it.
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The metadata in the app is generally correct with the song you listen to, contrary to what has happened to me when downloading music from Youtube and then playing it on your local player.
Unfortunately the app has no support for PC (or Linux), but if you are interested in something similar there is Moosync which serves almost the same purpose.
I’ve been using this on and off for a while, since v1.3 in September (and swapping with InnerTune which seems to now be abandoned…) but I have a few glaring issues with it as a daily driver.
Downloads are a mess. Tap download and it may or may not download. The download notification frequently becomes persistent for some reason, even if the downloads have finished and you kill/restart the app. Restarting my phone will get rid of it. Accessing auto cached songs is hit and miss if you don’t have internet which completely defeats the point of it. Also there’s no download management so whatever you download is now what you have saved unless you delete the library and start over…
The library page is ass. There’s no breakdowns by song or artist or album or any other category. You have favorites, followed, most played, and downloaded along with a bunch of playlists under that and finally a recently added list. If I want to shuffle my library I go to downloaded (because I download everything) and just tap a song which will start playing but take the UI ~10 seconds to catch up while, I’m assuming, it builds the playlist.
When I connect to a bluetooth device and my screen turns off I immediately lose the bluetooth connection. Turn the screen back on, reconnect, start playing the music again and it works fine after that. This only happens with SimpMusic. Occasionally have had issues connecting to bluetooth and the app says it’s playing via bluetooth but when you change the volume it says it’s playing via phone while no audio is coming out anywhere. This is usually paired with a “something unexpected happened” error message and app restart (have had this issue loop before for hours, phone restart fixed it).
The music player notification stops working regularly and just won’t come back until I restart the phone.
Intense lag after listening for a while.
No dislike button to help avoid songs.
And maybe my last complaint which is relatively minor to the other things, but under some categories, like new releases, it will show the art, the name of the album/single and then say “Album” instead of the artist which probably annoys me more than it should and may be a result of the other issues adding up.
No, my last complaint is the copying of Spotify’s horrible UI, but somehow it’s even worse.
On the upside, sponsorblock works well, my YTM playlists are all accessible, even ones I forgot existed from the GPM days, and the app does work for the most part. Long listening sessions work better than Innertune or Vimusic did. Hoping to see this continue to be worked on and improved, it still has a long way to go though.
Wait InnerTune is abandoned?? That’s a bummer, imo it is literally the best music app, especially the caching is amazing.
Maybe, maybe not… The dev could just be busy with life right now. The last build was released early September and the last commit was just over 3 months ago so IDK, I suppose we’ll see. I also love InnerTune and would love to see it continue to grow.