Review of MMA (1.1.3.0491)

[sirandar]

Phone: Samsung Note 4

Update 1) Surprisingly MMA handles its own button presses from a headphone. It is missing the triple press backwards 1 track but overall works well.


Previously MMA was missing so many MM specific features that there really wasn't any reason not to use PowerAmp instead.

PowerAmp is a great player but can't read ratings from tag or support MM rating or any other field. Previously MMA couldn't either.

The dev of MMA have currently release a product I can review as it now has two key features:

1) Ratings work
2) MMA catalogs its own music so you can specify only where your music is. This also means that music can be catalogued properly as Android does a terrible job.

A third feature is syncing over Wifi, which actually works.

Review
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1) Install was simple and uneventful as long as you give SD card access for library
2) Cataloguing the collection was also surprisingly uneventful. Nothing glitched except one album almost direct from Itunes.
3) Usage == usage is actually very well implemented and queuing tracks is much simpler than Poweramp for a MMW user
4) Ratings == they don't show up unless you sync because they are not read from tag. This is non-optimal but probably required for lower end devices. Ratings show up in both the NOW PLAYING and the LIBRARY view, which is a huge step forward and probably a first for Android! You can see all 5 star tracks by using the ratings node but the results are just dumped en-mass into a list which isn't all that useful. They should be in their separate album artist nodes that you can expand. Alternately the user should just be able to filter on rating so only the desired rating shows up in the library view.

5) Aesthetically MMA isn't nearly as pretty as PowerAmp, but it us plenty good enough considering the extra functionality. I would say that all that needs changing is the simley Artist icon.

6) Syncing with Wifi: Surprisingly it works well. It initially messed up because I tried to sync with my existing collection on my phone. I cleared out my phone and the sync worked perfectly for 10K tracks. That is quite an achievement and I shudder thinking about how much work getting that working must have been. The only issue I had was that MMW by default includes music videos in the music node and this caused some havok but it was easily fixed. There are a lot of sync options to play with and quite a few are useful.

IMO What Still Needs Doing
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1) Mood is a very useful field if you actually bother setting it for all your tracks. Perhaps more useful than rating. I would guess only 1% bother doing this. It would be nice if this field would get supported in MMA, but understand if you don't.

2) The ratings node isn't really much use when you have 10K tracks on your device, 5000 of which are 5 star. Either use filtering or group the hits somehow

3) The UI is fully functional and well made but some of the the icons could use some updating. The buttons are big which makes MMA easier to use.

[guest]

And MMA is what exactly?

[meljmartin]

Media Monkey for Android

[sirandar]

After 2 weeks I can say MMA has completely replaced PowerAmp just on the ability to see rating in the library view alone.

But it was also been very stable and functional and it is much easier for a MMW4 user to queue up tracks (any user actually).

When playing through bluetooth on my car audio, MMA is unable to play anything without first opening MMA and pressing play on my phone .... after that the controls work fine. Same was true for PowerAmp. On rare occasions both players work by pressing play on my car stereo after Bluetooth link with the phone still in my pocket .... but it is very rare and I can't figure out what conditions allow this.

Syncing has all sorts of weirdness but is basically sound. The issues found some inconsistencies in my library which I fixed. Chinese characters in file names seems to be a no no. After sorting syncing works perfectly. The forced separation of music and classical music is a problem, but I just changed that tag to something else and got all my tracks in one spot. Labelling music as classical isn't all that useful anyway...... is is a sonata, solo piano work or a symphony?

[sirandar]

Congratulations ..... The latest MMA patch 0496 fixed my Bluetooth player control issues ...... PowerAmp never fixed..