Musicolet has been my "go-to" offline music player after searching for a few years. It can handle big libraries, shows album art, has different shuffle options, and more.
That sounds awesome! I might have to try that out for my archived podcast eps or audiobooks that aren't in an audiobook with chapters format already. Shit is annoying to lose my place just because I had friends in the car and needed to put on music.
Off topic slightly but for music VLC for Android is even better compared to its desktop sibling for the same purpose.
I mean VLC for desktop will play anything and I dont deny how powerfull it is but afaik:
it doesnt rescan automaticaly for added and removed music like a watchfolder.
No native dark mode yet, yes a ton of dark mode themes, but they all are geared to video and lacking the medialibrary with album browsing.
I went into the offline mobile music player rabbit hole recently too. I tried like a dozen and personally I think none of them are sufficient, including Symphony.
The most important functionality for me is queuing e.g. how it works and how easy it is to use and it's just a horrible experience for virtually every player. So disappointing 😣
I've been happy with Phonograph for queueing, nothing special but it seems very easy to use to me. Looks like tons of good recommendations on this thread I haven't tried out tho, definitely might be something better out there
Auxio is excellent. Has the UI I've been looking for for ages, can shuffle by genre, great queue system, etc.
Only part i dont like is that it has an unskippable modal at startup where it scans your library instead of doing this as an invisible async step in the background and displaying what it has as it gets it.
Doesnt sort in alphabetical order correctly (aka ignoring words like "the" at the begining of of artists names) even tho all my music has sorting tags and it doesnt show every album art, for some reason, even tho all my music has album art embeded :c
The ui is pretty, like most forks of metroplayer, but I will stay with Gonemad (although not foss :c)
Last version update is from 30 March 2023. It doesn't follow Android UI and has its own, works without a problem. I see no problem here, as long as it works. At least for Android 14, should be fine for 15 too.
Anything released on Github has no code requirements or restrictions, that is why some people do reproducible builds of software, to verify is has 100% functionality of a binary release. Any app from F-Droid is repoducible.