Decoupled 4+

As someone who collects a lot of music, I wanted to find an app where I could bring my music with me everywhere. I came across several but many of them had a ton of frustrations such as not playing files correctly, intrusive ads, or frustrating file management. This app was one I came across and decided to give a try. So far, this is the best sounding music player I have tried, and plays all my files properly, however it is very barebones. Things such as playlists, shuffle and repeat do not exist. While I normally don’t utilize these features as I just listen to albums, they’re something that would be nice to have and I know it’ll be a dealbreaker for some. The one thing that annoys me though is the lack of a metadata editor. This is something that is very helpful and the lack of it is jarring and a little frustrating. This being said, this is still the best flac player on the app store and i can put up with the absence of those features as it is the best app to play flac files. If an update adds those features in, I’ll change my rating.

I am slowly transitioning away from streaming services and moving towards mostly purchasing CDs and digital music. I hated many of the extra features and recommendations that streaming services provide and wanted a minimalistic app so much that I was going to try to write my own—however, now I don’t need to because I found this app! The user interface is gorgeous and I like that it can play many types of files and that it is completely separate from Apple Music. When I initially started using it, I noticed that it would not play ALAC files, so I reached out to the developer who responded to me and fixed the bug within 2 hours!!! I definitely recommend this app to anyone who owns music and/or is feeling tired of streaming services and their “features”. Thank you Tamás for making this available for free!

This isn’t an app for everyone. But if you are one of the people it appeals to, you will see it instantly. This app lets you play your audio files (in a variety of formats) stored locally on your device. It’s a simple premise, but so many apps would bungle the experience by pestering you to sign up for their streaming service, serving you up advertisements constantly, etc. On top of that the app is free and it doesn’t track any user data. I poked around online and saw that Tamas didn’t want to monetize the app, that he would just be happy to see it get used. Beautiful.

There’s a level of power user that will demand a finer level of control over their library that may need to look elsewhere, but if you just have a basic library structure, I found the experience to be very user-friendly. Decoupled is now my favorite app on my phone.