doubleTwist Classic Player

A while back, we released CloudPlayer, an open Play Music alternative that links with Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive so you can listen to all your music, everywhere without restrictions or phone storage limitations. But what if you don’t want to use your precious wireless data? In the past several months, we’ve been working on a complete revamp of our older and more well known app, doubleTwist Classic Player, which is optimized for offline listening and music sync. Today, we’re making available for public testing on the Play Store an alpha version of doubleTwist Classic, that was built fresh from the ground up.

The new doubleTwist Classic introduces a streamlined material design UI and features:

• Lossless support (ALAC, FLAC & 24-bit audio)
• 10-band EQ, bass boost and other premium sound options (premium)
• Advanced sorting options and folder navigation
• Metadata & artwork editor
• Android Wear & Android Auto support
• Scrobbling
• AirSync support for syncing with Mac/PC (premium)
• AirPlay & Chromecast support (premium)

Missing features that are planned for a future release include gapless, crossfade, podcast support, UPnP/DLNA support and AirPlay video support.

CloudPlayer gets Sleep Timer & App Shortcuts

Today we released a delicious update to CloudPlayer introducing two highly requested features: a Sleep Timer and for the lucky ones on Android 7.1 & higher, app shortcuts. With CloudPlayer’s new app shortcuts you can launch straight into the Up Next screen to view your play queue, browse your recently added & top rated songs or launch Magic Radio. Plus we also made improvements to the Android Auto voice query support so you can more easily change music in your car. And for those of you who prefer to listen to your music offline, we also updated doubleTwist Pro with the same great features.

AirPlay your music to Apple TV

Back in May 2011, we were the first to bring AirPlay music streaming to Android, helping hundreds of thousands of Android users listen to their favorite tunes through their Apple TV and other AirPlay-compatible devices.

Fast forward to April 2017 and Apple, in a surprising and anachronistic move, released a 4th generation Apple TV firmware update (tvOS 10.2) that blocked 3rd party apps from supporting AirPlay by requiring a proprietary pairing process conveniently restricted to Apple apps and devices. Yep, Apple wants you to switch to an iPhone if you happen to own an Apple TV! But users today demand interoperability between their devices. Modern households are diverse ecosystems of connected devices, full of iPhones, Android phones, smart TVs and a cacophony of gadgets.

So we went ahead and added support for Apple’s new pairing process in the latest doubleTwist Pro release because we believe the era of walled gardens is long gone. The AirPlay functionality is also live for CloudPlayer so you can stream your cloud music to your Apple TV.

OneDrive gets lightning fast

doubleTwist CloudPlayer has become very popular among OneDrive users & audiophiles looking to manage and stream their music collection in the audio format of their choice. One common complaint we received was that CloudPlayer was too slow in importing songs from OneDrive for first time users.

Well, we listened and greatly improved the import speed of MP3/M4A audio tracks to make it lightning fast. Artwork import and indexing of FLAC lossless audio is slower and we’re working on optimizing it for a future release. And to spice things up, we also added a brand new blue theme as an option in the Settings.

Happy listening!

Gapless playback for cloud and local music

At doubleTwist, our exclusive focus is to serve the millions of digital music collectors that are increasingly neglected by the big guys in Mountain View and Cupertino. Over the past several years we’ve introduced a number of audiophile features such as lossless streaming support, 10-band EQ and casting for a wide range of AirPlay, Chromecast & DLNA-capable devices.

But our latest update is bringing something new and unique: gapless playback support that works not only with songs stored locally on your phone but also, for CloudPlayer users, any music stored in the cloud on a Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive account. This means you can finally listen to your DJ mixes or iconic albums like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon without any annoying gaps between tracks. It will work regardless of whether it’s a download or a stream, a set of files on your SD card or a folder in a distant datacenter.

Keep in mind that for a true gapless experience, your music tracks need to contain special metadata telling the player how to properly play the songs. As long as you ripped the tracks using an app that can correctly embed this metadata (like iTunes or EAC/LAME), they will play without any issues. Gapless playback is supported for MP3, AAC, FLAC, and ALAC.

The new update is now rolling out on the Play Store for both CloudPlayer and doubleTwist Classic Player.

doubleTwist has you covered!

If you’re old enough to remember dial-up Internet, then you might be familiar with .mod, .s3m, .xm and .it files. These were popular music formats in the late 80s and 90s used for demos, in-game music as well as standalone music distribution. Although they’ve since been superseded by more modern formats, a passionate community still exists around these classic formats.

In the latest version of doubleTwist and CloudPlayer we added support for these file formats so that you can take a trip down memory lane. Here are some classics to get you started:

axelf.mod: Beverly Hills Cop tune
das_boot_remix.mod: Das Boot remix
cantina.mod: Star Wars cantina scene music
cronolog.s3m: Jean Michel Jarre Chronologie Part 4 remix

Simply download the files to your Android device and then import them using the “Scan Local Folder” in the app settings.