A simple to use, minimalistic music player application especially designed for managing classical music. The application has access to local files only and uses very low system resources.

Is Johnny Brahms’ double concerto a “Song”? Who is singing? And who is the “artist”? The orchestra? The soloists? Or the mentioned Johnny? What about its three movements? Are these all separate “Songs”?

Why does my favourite music player present all my music as “Allegro” and I never know which one is currently playing? Is there nobody who’s interested in the composer of an opus? Why are are my album and titles truncated to “Carl Philipp Eman…” or “Clara Schumann: Sona…”?

Most music player applications are designed for so called “pop music” (and so is the Android system itself). Thus obviously other kinds of music, like classical music or baroque music, are “unpopular”, aren’t they? But those people dealing with classical music usually are also interested in the composer, not only the performer, who might be not the same person (which is the less probable, the longer the composer’s date of death lies before the date of the performance). Also it’s quite normal that an opus, like a symphony, consists of several movements or an opera of an overture and several arias (by the way, an aria is a kind of song, isn’t it?).

The Unpopular Music Player is a simple application which is designed to (also) play “unpopular” music (e.g. classic, baroque, romantic usw.). Music files are not only grouped in “albums”, but also in opera (or opuses?) , e.g. the movements of a cello concerto, inside the same album. The composer is also presented. If possible no information will be truncated, instead also extremely long titles (like combined movement descriptions in case of “attacca”) will be shown untruncated. The goal is to present an opus on the smartphone in the same way it would be presented on a CD box or in a concert programme.

By the way, the string “song” is not used in its user interface.

Of course the application can only show what is stored inside the music files, in the so called “tags” (meta information). If these are wrong or incomplete, one could use handy applications like Kid3, Qoobar, iTunes or similar to repair or add information especially for classical music. Additionally to the usual meta information, like “album”, “track number”, “CD number”, “title”, the Unpopular Music Player mainly relies on “composer” and “group” (used for opus), but also shows “year” resp. “date” and “conductor”, if existing. A sensible organisation of music on the device is to use one folder for each album, and additionally to the music files (mp3, mp4 or similar) this folder should contain a picture called “folder.jpg” in order to help the Android system with file and album management. By the way: files named like “frontpage.jpg” would be shown the photo gallery, which usually is unintended.

The Player uses the media file management provided by the Android system. In case the information shown is wrong or inconsistent, there are some advices to rebuild the internal media database. What could work is to clear all data of the internal “Media Storage” (recommended for 4.4) or of the standard music play application (recommended for 5.x), to reboot and then (for 5.x) start the standard music player again.

Final words: Writing this application took lots of time. However, I decided to provide the application free and without advertisements for people liking classical music. So please rate this “opus 1” benevolently and in doubt first send me a message instead of providing a bad rating.Thanks in advance!