Poweramp v2.0 beta In-Depth Review : Lock Screen & Settings

Now moving on to the lock screen. In words of a user at the Poweramp forum, ‘The new lock screen is epic’ & we have to agree. It is fluid with swipe to next/prev support. Shuffle/Repeat are also accessible. You can hide the Notification bar if you like.

Moving on to settings:

While we were browsing through the settings we were really impressed by the effort the dev has put into incorporating features. Some of the features are fairly advanced for a casual user and you might even have to google them just to understand them. Its like a complete OS in itself with no feature missing.

Startup & UI

• Start up screen: last played/library/folder/player
• Theme: Poweramp 2.0 Final will feature one of the most powerful skinning engine in Android market. 4 themes are pre-included in the beta. We really liked the Black Neon theme.
  
• Album art options
  mentions are ‘Download only on Wifi’ & ‘Album art Zoom’
• Look & feel:
  <<button resets current track
  hide status bar
  inverse status text color

Audio engine

• Fade crossfade & gapless settings:
  1. Auto   fade
  2. Manual fade
  3. Crossfade length
  4. Fade play/pause stop
  5. Fade on seek
  6. True gapless
• Replay gain
  1. Apply/ Don’t
  2. Source: Album track
  3. RG preamp
  4. Pre amp for songs without ReplayGain Info
• Audio focus change
  You can choose to temporarily or permanent pause the playing song on notification & resume auto. after calls
• Advanced tweaks
  1. Keep service in memory for playing songs while playing a game or browsing internet.
  2. 7 db eq bands
  3. Restore Equalizer presets
  4. Audio buffer size
  5. Audio thread priority

Folders/Library

• Rescan : This is a mind-blowing feature which will really make your life easier if you have a lot of songs. Poweramp has a custom Library scan so that you can exclude your music folder from system scan. This will reduce the time taken by system scan and your sd card will available in lesser time after reboot.
  In words of the dev, “10x-100x scan speed comparing to system library tag scanner, 1000 songs scanned in 15-30sec (depends on phone/sd card)“
• Music folders: Select your  music folders
  
• Advanced
  1. Folders lib scanner
  2. Lists
  3. Auto advance & queue
  4. Playlist Import/Export

Misc

• Headset
  Respond to headset buttons with double press/triple press support
  You can activate beep sounds for headset button press which is really useful since sometimes you are unsure whether the press of headset button was successful or not.
  One feature we found missing here was ‘Navigating songs by Volume Rocker’ which is present in PlayerPro.
• Lock screen
  Customize everything about lock screen from seek bar to album art. Dim background a little or hide status bar to maximize the screen area.
  Enable/Disable Direct unlock \
• Scrobbling
  via simple/official last.fm app or scrobble  or droid

Due to the sheer number of features present, It will take you days before you are through with its features & then some. And its not like they are not useful. Every feature is a must-have. Any other Music app that you will use after this will seem bland & make you miss Poweramp.

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