Android Winamp Review

Google's Android has matched iOS on almost all fronts. However, one of the things that continues to go amiss is an easy way to sync media between your home computer and your Android device. App developers have tried to fill this void in the past with apps like doubleTwist but none have matched Apple's iTunes/iPhone ease of syncing. Well Winamp is having a try at it and for the most part they seem to have succeeded. They have launched a capable media player for the Android OS that not only allows syncing but allows you to do it wirelessly over your home Wi-Fi network.


Design
The design of the app is very similar to things we have seen on the Android platform before. The home screen is comprised of 6 familiar boxes that will immediately remind you of Google's stock music player. It has the usual choices of Artists, Albums, Songs, Playlists, etc. Nothing very exciting here and I hope they will continue to update this as this design is getting a bit tired. I can't help but expect them to release several different skins in the coming months as customization has always been one of their MO's.

Functional but boring design

Once you get past the home screen things get a bit more exciting and innovative. After you select a song it aromatically adds the entire album to the "now playing" list and slides up a now playing shade. Think of this like the notification shade from the top of the phone but it slides from the bottom. This can be pulled back down at any point to reveal the screen you have just selected from. I found this to be a nice touch as it allows you to keep an eye on the currently playing track while looking through your music library.

Shade rises from the bottom to reveal now playing information

 The player also has a lock screen widget which can be turned on from the settings. It does it's job well displaying album art and allowing you to pause, play, and skip songs from the lock screen. 


Wireless Syncing
Syncing your device first requires that you download Winamp onto your home device and import your music collection into the player. (Note: in order to enable Android syncing you must have beta version 5.59. You can get this here.) Once your music is imported simply go into the application on your phone and turn on wireless syncing in the settings menu. Looking back to your computer, your phone should now pop up on the Winamp sidebar under devices section. Clicking on your device will populate Winamp's frames with the music that is on your phone a la iTunes. Now it's as simple as dragging and dropping the files you want from Winamp onto your device's icon.

Winamp device manager

Files sync very quickly and pop up on your Android Winamp media player immediately. I did run into one problem though. A lot of my music is stored in .flac format. Supposedly Winamp will transcode these files on the fly to a format which Android can play but I instead received an error message telling me the files could not be transfered. This would be an amazing feature but as it stands now it seems any non standard music files must be converted manually.


All in all wireless syncing works great and it is only a feature or two away from total music syncing bliss. However there is an elephant in the room, music streaming. People don't want to pick and choose which songs they will want to listen to this week. They want to have access to all their music all the time. This is when music streamers, like Subsonic or Audiogalaxy, come in which allow you access to all your music over Wi-Fi or 3g. Though Winamp is about as convenient as can be it still gets beat by such software in accessibility.



Wrap up
All in all this is a very a very solid media player/syncing combo. The media player interface is nice and reasonably intuitive. Once they get transcoding worked out competitors will be hard pressed to beat them at ease of use. They have leap frogged over other Android media players as well as other media syncing options. My only fear is that they are still being left behind by media streaming.

Winamp is currently available in the Android Market
Price: Free