Power Player

Power Player is a bold and opinionated player hidden behind a deceptively simple exterior. While its structure is as approachable as general-purpose players come—in no small part due to its stock iOS tab bar—its engaging “Home” view, dynamically colored album views, and gold-standard iPad experience elevate Power Player beyond its humble appearance to one of the finest players available.

To start, Power Player’s primary new feature this year is the “Home” tab view to serve as the player’s front door experience instead of dumping users to an arbitrary tab like other general-purpose players. This new view features a respectable number of discovery collections, which are listed below in the order they appear:

• Recently Added Albums (displayed as a grid)
• Recently Played Songs (displayed as a list)
• Most Played Songs (displayed as a list)
• Loved Songs (displayed as a list)

The order above is intentionally detailed since there’s not yet any way to customize or remove any of the existing discovery collections in “Home” and no mechanism to create your own. The “Home” page is strictly a WYSIWYG discovery experience, no customization whatsoever. Considering this feature’s young age, I have no difficulty accepting it doesn’t match Marvis Pro or Albums’ discovery arsenal, but not even providing users the means to reorder or hide these pre-built collections is a miss and deeply disappointing for an app claiming to be all about “power”.

However, I continue to maintain that discovery features are always worth providing, even if they aren’t particularly great in comparison to other players’ offerings. Despite its issues, I do like the new “Home” view. I’m thrilled to have a “Recently Added” albums collection in Power Player now, and items in the “Loved” songs collection feature the lovely, dynamic color theme used in the album view. This design embellishment really shines on the iPad where the list items have more room to spread out; it’s like a trophy case for proudly displaying your personal favorites, and elevates the “Loved” section to be the “Home” view’s crowning jewel.

The rest of the app remains mostly the same as it was last year. While I’m disappointed at the relatively slow rate of enhancement compared to what others like Albums received this year, Power Player nonetheless remains a fantastic player. The album view still features the same, great dynamic color matching feature I raved about last year.

The iPad experience also remains industry leading thanks to its numerous interface optimizations that take full advantage of the larger screen. Its rate of change isn’t as radical as some other players, but for an app coming into this year as well-off as Power Player, this may be all it needs for the moment.

Widgets

Power Player supports a single widget for each of the three size classes.

The large and medium widgets are “Home” widgets, which display music from one of the four “Home” view sections: “Recently Added”, “Recently Played”, “Most Played”, and “Loved”. These widgets follow the same restrictions their “Home” view counterparts do, in that “Recently Added” is strictly album-based and the other three are strictly song-based. Aside from choosing between those four sections, there’s no other customization available.

The small widget is a “Now Playing” type, which displays the edge-to-edge album art of the currently playing track along with the song title and artist.

While there’s not much customization to speak of here and the choices are limited compared to other players, they’re well engineered and I haven’t run into bugs with them like I have with Soor’s.

Personal Score Card

• Next App: “Sathorn”