Meridian Android Music Player: Search Option, FLAC and APE Support Makes it Friendly
Meridian is more of an all-around, feature-filled media player, adding a few cool features that make it more friendly than Android’s default player.
LifeHacker.com says,
Additional File Types: Most Android devices have a pretty wide range of supported formats, but Meridian adds FLAC and APE support, both of which are missing from Android. It’s not something everyone will use (APE isn’t that popular, and I doubt a lot of people are wasting precious SD card space with lossless files), but if you’re one of the few that will, it’s a nice change of pace.
Gestures: In the Now Playing window, you can change tracks by using the regular button controls, but Meridian also supports a number of swipe gestures. You can swipe left or right to skip ten seconds back or forward, and you can swipe up and down to change tracks.
Ratings: Meridian has support for a five star rating system, and although it doesn’t carry over from other media players, it’s still nice to have. After rating songs, you can then go to the Songs section of the library, hit Menu, and filter out songs below a certain star rating. This is useful if you want to, say, shuffle through your library but want to exclude songs rated 3 or lower.
Search & Lyrics: In the Now Playing window, you can hit the small search button to bring up a few different options. You can search for the song’s lyrics, which is handy, but you can also search some pre-generated terms in the app of your choosing. The terms usually contain the track’s tags, like artist or album, and after picking your term you can choose what app in which to search with them—so, you could search info about the album in your browser, or find it in the Amazon MP3 app.
Other Features: Meridian contains a handy ID3 tag editor, if you want to change the artist, album, or other tags. It also has an On-The-Go-type playlist, to which you can add songs from the Now Playing window. Like MixZing, it supports Last.fm scrobbling and is available in a number of versions in the Market: The Conservative version is the most stable, while Pioneer has a few more features. The $2.99 Pro version includes a home screen widget, lyric file support, album art downloading, and a few other small features.
Send an email to Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at whitson@lifehacker.com.
