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Cubed Is a Much Better Music App for Android


Android: The Music app that comes pre-loaded on Android phones can be described, generously, as functional. Cubed, a music player with better looks, great features, and automatic album art grabbing, is what you should consider using instead.

The two main reasons we can't quite label Cubed as a total replacement are that it's in active, beta development at the moment, and may become a paid app (not that there's anything wrong with that!) or change features in the near future. That said, even at this early, semi-hidden stage, Cubed (named with the superscript "3" in the Market) is a much better music experience.

Cubed asks to grab new album art from the web when you load new music to your phone, because that's how it organizes your music—even the two alternative themes stylize the album covers. You get three views of your album collection: a cube that rotates up and down between albums, and left to right for alphabetical search; an album art wall; and a "Boring" list view. The player controls themselves are functional, though, like Kevin Tofel, I found the in-track audio scrubbing a bit wonky, and playlist creation could be a little neater. If you're a Last.fm user, there's a scrobbling tool you can get at in the options, and there's a Concerts Cubed plug-in that shows when the artists on your microSD card and others are playing nearby. Honestly, this little app had us at "grab new album art from the web," but it's impressive to see the directions this little open-source app, which grew out of the RockOn Music Player, plans to go.

Cubed is a free download from the Android market, though it's not easy to pin down. You can search for "rockon" and grab the little "3" download, or use a Barcode Scanner app to grab it from the jkOnTheRun link.

Cubed For Android: A Mesmerizing Music Player [jkOnTheRun]