GoneMAD Music Player: Hear Your Music Your Way

Before we get any further, I should come clean — I’m a die-hard Winamp fan. I began using the desktop version back in 1997 and it suited my needs over the years as my music collection grew. When I got my first Android phone, I immediately sought out Winamp’s app for the platform and enjoyed the interface as well as the desktop-to-mobile wifi syncing. But I soon wanted more from my music player and started trying out everything the Play Store had to offer. I still haven’t found a favorite, but GoneMAD Music Player sure comes close.

Perfect for power users, GoneMAD Music Player is packed to the gills with features and configurable options to tweak the app to do your exact bidding. From detailed playback control to lockscreen and homescreen widgets, passing by smart playlists, gesture support and configurable multi-band EQ, this player has got it all. Let’s see how well it handles tuneage with some real-world testing, and how it stacks up against the competition.

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Overview

GoneMAD Music Player is a highly customizable audio app for smartphones and tablets that’s great for users with large music libraries or those who want a fine-grained control over their listening experience. It supports most popular audio formats and can even handle M4B audiobooks. The app is available as a free full-featured 14-day trial, with an unlocker for $3.99 in the Play Store.

GoneMAD’s simple but functional interface

The Basics

GoneMAD Music Player takes care of all the usual audio playback duties, supporting AAC, MP3, OGG, FLAC, WMA and other formats and offering gapless playback and ReplayGain — so your tracks are all equally loud. The app scans your device’s storage to find music and then allows you to browse through your library by artist, album, genre and song name. You can create playlists by adding tracks or albums, by loading M3U files, or by using Smart Playlists to generate lists based on a variety of parameters including duration, year, rating, play count and so on.

Browse your library by album (left); Create a smart playlist with a variety of parameters (right)

GoneMAD lets you control your tuneage the way you want:

• using the app’s on-screen buttons,
• with configurable gestures within the app  — swipe left/right to skip between tracks and up/down to skip between artists, for example)
• or by using any of 6 widgets on your homescreen or the lovely fullscreen lockscreen widget.

These are all customizable in terms of look and behavior in the vast Preferences menu.

Options Galore

If you like tweaking your apps to get them to run just so, you’ve come to the right place. GoneMAD has so many options that they’re actually split into nine sections for easier navigation. Here are some notable ones:

• General: customize your lockscreen player, keep your device awake during playback, control playback with your headset —pause when they’re unplugged, resume when plugged back in; configure your headset button actions and even use a single-button headset for multiple actions — scrobble your listening history using Simple Last.fm Scrobbler or Scrobble Droid, and choose how you want your album art downloaded and stored, integrate with Tasker and backup/restore your settings, play counts, and ratings.
• Audio: tweak the EQ to show anywhere between 2 and 10 bands, use external DSPs, configure Crossfade, limiter, playback and DSP priority, ReplayGain and auto volume adjust for your device’s speaker, headphones and bluetooth headset.
• UI: download and select skins — more like color schemes — configure app background display — you can use album art too — and customize the navigation bar.
• Now Playing: toggle what info and buttons are displayed, customize album art display, toggle and customize gestures.

There are several more options to play around with, but I’ll let the tweak-freaks among you discover those for yourselves.

GoneMAD Music Player has more options than you can shake a smartphone at

The developer has also released a music extension for the popular lockscreen widget Dashclock, which can display track info from a number of apps including GoneMAD — get it here.

Using GoneMAD Music Player

Eschewing my habit of tuning in with Winamp, I began using GoneMAD a little over a week before beginning to write about it — and I didn’t really want to switch back. The app did what it said on the box perfectly; I didn’t encounter any skips or crashes, and found the lockscreen player to be a joy to use. Since I usually listen to music while I commute or ride my bike, I loved being able to control playback with my headset just the way I wanted.

GoneMAD also features a powerful search tool which comes in handy when you just remember part of the name of a song or artist. Oh, and there’s a tag editor and sleep timer too!

Edit tags for tracks or albums with ease

The app makes do with very minimal UI elements and takes advantage of album art to dress itself up — and it’s really quick about downloading art too. I preferred the simple 4×2 homescreen widget to interact with the player, and even dove into the Smart Playlist creator to make my own lists for workouts and long drives — easy-peasy! My only gripe is that I couldn’t access the bookmarks on my audiobooks, which means I had to keep a separate app on my phone just to do that.

Choose from a number of widgets from 2×2 to 4×4

There’s certainly a lot of competition in the music player space, but even heavy hitters like Poweramp Music Player, n7player, Winamp and PlayerPro can’t top GoneMAD when it comes to flexibility. However, you might miss Winamp’s streaming radio and the gorgeous skins that Poweramp and PlayerPro support.

Conclusion

GoneMAD Music Player is perhaps the most configurable audio player out there and is a wonderful choice for power users. The control it offers over your media library, coupled with its incredible search tool, makes it easy to manage large audio libraries. The UI is really more functional than it is beautiful, and I would love to see an improved design for the player and widgets in the next iteration. Other than that, this is a great player to rock out to your tunes with. Give the free trial a go and see if it can’t satisfy your craving for absolute control.