I have been searching for an alternative for the built in music player ever since I got my hands on my 5800. Not that the built in player has some nasty issues but I just want to get a feel of other players in the competition. So far there are very few players in the market and Music Launcher (still in it beta stage) is one of the free applications. After playing around with Music Launcher for around a day, am reverting back to the tried and tested buit in music player for all my music as of now. Lets see what makes me say that.

Installation

Music Launcher v0.99(BETA) can be downloaded for free from the official website of MLauncher. Please note that this is just a BETA release and hence you can expect some bugs or random program crashes. I didnt experience any crashes during my usage though. Moving on let me a highlight a few features of mlauncher.

Interface

The interface is pretty basic with no fancy options. The default screen looks more like an explorer than a music player.

You can explore the subfolders by clicking on the "Subf" button and "up" takes you out of the subfolders. Hitting on "Play" will take you to the music player which doesn't impress much with its lackluster interface:

The earlier versions of mlauncher lacked the soft buttons for previous and next tracks and relied on swipe movement for changing of tracks. Even in this version, the soft buttons are not default and can be added in options -> preferences -> next/previous buttons -> Yes

Personally I found the swipe not very user friendly for changing tracks and I prefer soft buttons on my mlauncher. The next and previous track buttons are no doubt the most heavily used buttons for any music player and I prefer having a soft button to swiping for these routine tasks.

Album Art

Album Art was something I was looking forward to in this player as their website featured some amazing screenshots with huge album art in the player. I was again let down here as the player failed to find the album art where as the same song displayed album art in the default music player.

I don't know why mlauncher cannot detect the album art on the same track. For mlauncher to display album art you have to organize your music such that:

Are you kidding me? I have like 6 gigs of music from several artists and albums. You cannot expect me to manually search for album art and organize it into different folders.

Customization

There are not many customizable options in mlauncher as such. For starters. there is no graphic equalizer to tailor your music to your liking. Infact the only customization option it provides are color scheme, next/previous track and crossfading between the tracks. Lets take a look at the different color schemes available in this version:

I am not impressed with any of these colors schemes.

Pros

1. Music playback is excellent
2. Explorer like navigation is easy for finding your music provided your music is organized into appropriate folders and sub folders

Cons

1. Lousy interface with gawdy color schemes
2. No album art (in absence of .jpg file in the appropriate folder)
3. No graphic equaliser
4. Its difficult to search through your music if its not organized

Verdict

Mlauncher is a half baked product which can be expected as its still in its BETA stage but I don't see any good reason to shift to this player. It lacks several basic things like a decent interface, graphic equalizer, shuffle option, default album art detection to name a few. I don't know whats the USP of this product gonna be. For mlauncher to be usable, one has to spend hours organizing his/her music into specific folders and sub-folders. You cannot expect a user to buy or even use a player (if provided as a free download) to work on his/her music to enjoy your player. A product has to pamper the target audience with some user friendly options and innovative features. Its not like the default music player is absolute. It also lacks certain features, say ipod like cover flow, kinetic scrolling, easier music search etc. The market for alternative music players is wide open and its a sincere request from users like me to develop a product which can seriously challenge Ipod/Itunes in its usability and popularity. Coming back to mlauncher, its a long way to go for the developer team if they want to make it big in the market, given that the default player trumps it in all departments. Moreover default music player comes pre-loaded and you gotta offer something which the built in music player lacks to attract the users. As of now, I dont see a single feature to keep this application on my phone and am uninstalling it right after submitting this post.

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