Music Box plays what is on your memory card. Point it at a folder and it reads the files into songs, albums, artists and playlists — any .m3u it finds becomes a playlist. Then, if you have a music server at home, point it at that too. Navidrome, Airsonic, Gonic: anything that speaks Subsonic. The whole library arrives in the same lists as the music on the card rather than in a room of its own. A record held in both places is shown once, and it is the copy on the card that wins, because that one plays on a train. Searching plays YouTube Music, with no account needed to search or to stream.
The Radio tab holds two radios. Stations on the internet are browsed by place — country, then town, then what is on the air there, from radio.garden — and the ones you keep sit at the top.
Tap a station to hear it, hold it to make it a favorite. Under them, on a phone with a tuner, one row that opens the phone’s own FM app. Lists turn a page at a time. One queue holds all of it, and a long press puts a song next in that queue or on the end of it. Nothing is counted, there are no ads, and your library and settings stay on the phone. It asks for no accessibility service and reads no notifications. Free and GPL-3.0.
Well, thanks AGAIN for this great app! I have one small request; a search function when creating a playlist. It’s actually a bit of a pain to have to scroll through all my songs. And I don’t know if it’s possible, but the default Music app had a widget on the lock screen. Would it be possible to add this to Music Box as well?
Review for version 2.10.0
Author’s rating: ★★★★★ · Author of this review
I don’t have plans to do that here. Messaging, at least while I’ve been working out the Signal integration, has been getting a TON of updates (thanks for everyone’s patience!!), whereas Music Box is basically done, aside from a few odds and ends over time so I don’t feel like it would need the in-app updater. I recommend using Obtanium, an app that you can add the apk’s directly to and it will let you know if they have an update.
InkApps, Mudita’s official app store for the Kompakt, will also make this much easier.
So for now, no plans to add an in-app update feature in Music Box.
Review for version 2.10.0
Author’s rating: ★★★★★ · Author of this review
Thanks for the nudge! Version 2.10.3 is out now: the download button at the top of a playlist (next to Shuffle) now keeps YouTube songs on the phone too, not only songs from a music server. One press saves the whole list, one song at a time, and you can watch them land in Downloads. It works the same on an album or artist page.
Review for version 2.11.0
Author’s rating: ★★★★★ · Author of this review
It does now, if you’d like it to. Version 2.11.0 has a new switch in Settings: “Keep playing similar songs from YouTube”. It’s off unless you turn it on.
With it on, when the last song in your queue is from YouTube, Music Box asks YouTube Music what it would play next and adds those songs to the end, so the music carries on into other artists the way YouTube’s own radio does. From Nick Drake it went on to Labi Siffre, Rogér Fakhr and Linda Perhacs, which was a nice afternoon.
With it off, nothing changes: the queue plays what you chose and then stops.
One function I would love seeing added is if you could somewhere see the temporary playlist of songs that is built when you play an album and add several songs to the cue or mark them as being played next (Spotify has a function like this, where you can also change the order around if you like).
Review for version 2.13.0
Author’s rating: ★★★★★ · Author of this review
Thank you, that’s lovely to hear.
Half of this was there already, only hidden: hold down any song and its menu has Play next and Add to queue. Nothing on the screen tells you so, which is fair to grumble about.
The other half is new in 2.13.0, out now. Now Playing has Up next just under the top bar. It shows the song playing and everything lined up after it, whether from an album, a playlist or Add to queue. On each song the arrows move it earlier or later and the cross takes it out, and pressing a song plays on from there. At the bottom, Save as playlist keeps the queue for another day.
It’s arrows rather than dragging. A drag on this screen smears down the page and lands a place off; an arrow is one press and one redraw.
Review for version 2.15.0
Author’s rating: ★★★★★ · Author of this review
@somastudy Thank you. That one is in already, if a little hidden. Hold a song and choose Edit details: title, artist, album, album artist and track number. On an album’s own page the pencil at the top sets the album’s name and album artist on every track at once.
So for singles, give each the same album name and album artist and they gather into one album. For a co-artist, set the album artist to the main one and the song files under them, while its own artist line still says who sings on it.
It works on music files on the phone. Songs from a music server have to be changed on the server, since they are the server’s.
