Muzigrid is a music player app for Android with a difference. Rather than going with the usual artist and album sorting options, Muzigrid delivers something different. With gapless playback, lossless format handling, an ID3 tag editor and crossfade, Muzigrid is an app for the music lovers out there. How you go about actually playing your music is by selecting folders in a grid, you can choose one folder to play, or three at a time on shuffle. You can move around the folders on your storage around however you like and there’s no shortage of icons and naming options you can apply to folders. It’s certainly a little different, but how good a music app is it?
As well as having some music on your Android smartphone you’ll also need to download Muzigrid from the Play Store. Once you’ve done that, you can go ahead and open it up to a look at your grid of music folders.
Right off the bat, I have no idea what I am doing. This is not a good start, but there are pointers given to you as you explore different features of the app.
The general premise here – I think – is that you select a folder, or more of music that you wish to listen to, and then hit play. You can also move these around in the grid once highlighted by using the arrow keys.
You’ll have noticed that I’ve changed the pattern behind the scenes here, and there’s a good selection to choose from.
When playing your selection, the play view gives you some options to play around with.
Other than the neat links to Google search and YouTube the play view is really pretty basic, which is a little disappointing. I think this is because the app has built using Android guidelines from years ago. There’s no sign of Holo being used here, let alone a Material Design look and feel, and it all looks a little Android 2.3. There is however, an included Equaliser.
The main selling point of Muzigrid however is in its grid organisation system. The problem with this however, is that I think you need to have a fairly decent folder structure already. Of course, the ability to use emoji as icons can help you keep a track of different music for different moods or places, and you can create blocks of these different folders and then move them to wherever you want them to be.
You can also add your own images and title, so you can take full control of your music library with Muzigrad. This sort of system might not be for everyone, but if you enjoy organising things to your exacting standards, you can do a lot with this.
I’m a big audio nerd here at AH, I have headphones coming out of my ears, and I still have a dedicated MP3 player. When it comes to apps on my smartphone however, I am content with streaming services, and to be honest, TIDAL’s Android app makes it nice and easy to get access to the songs and music that I want, whenever I want. Of course, for a lot of people, streaming music is not an option due to poor data coverage and cost, so they keep music on their devices. Muzigrid is an app that can only really be recommended to those users who take their music with them, and want total control over it. The app isn’t easy to use and some aspects of it are genuinely confusing for whatever reason. Moving the folders around and adding them to play queue needs more explaining, and the now playing view is uninspiring, despite its neat features. The whole thing is designed with an older version of Android in mind, and with some cleaner icons and better documentation, this would be easier to recommend, as there is a good concept underneath all of this.
Ratings
- Speed (4/5) – I have little complaining to do on the performance of Muzigrid, it’s pretty speedy and it runs great for the most part.
- Theme (3.5/5) – The app just feels dated, sadly. The concept is good, but all of the icons and controls look like they have been lifted from a much older version of Android.
- Features (4/5) – Despite all of the wonky documentation, there are some good features here. It won’t be too everyone’s taste, that’s for sure. However, the ability to take total control of your music in such a novel way is worth playing around with at least.
- Overall (4/5) – If you can look past the dated look and feel and you’re the type to have music stored on your device, then Muzigrid could have a lot to offer you. Otherwise however, this isn’t the one for you if you’re used to streaming services.
Pros
- Allows users to take control over their music, not just the organisation but the tagging and more.
- Features gapless playback, crossfade and other audiophile musts as standard.
- Users can create playlists on the fly like jukebox however they like.
- Works well on tablets as well smartphones.
Cons
- Needs to be updated to a more modern Android look and feel, rather than the Android 2.3 look.
- Better documentation, like an interactive tutorial would help to get the concept across to users.
Muzigrid is certainly a little “out there” but that’s a good thing, as we need more apps willing to break the mould. The problem however, is that this isn’t a good-looking app and there’s very little documentation or anything in the way of a tutorial for curious users to work with. With updated graphics and such, this would be much easier to recommend to people.