From the Store description:
Play songs, organize music, make playlists, tinker under-the-hood, style the UI or maybe just let the song play on loop! Enjoy your music the way you like without any distractions or ads because Bread Player is yours freely and personally.
Free and open-source, Bread Player offers a better look and a better playback engine than Groove Music Player. Coming now with a 10-band Equalizer + PreAMP and Last.fm Scrobbling, Bread Player is ready to become your default player.
Bread Player offers many options to customize the way you experience your music from "Theming" to "album art color adaptation" to adding "favorites" and displaying your playback history.
- Smooth Play/Pause Transitions.
- Private Playlists.
- Manually Change Any Tracks Album Art.
- Hardware-Independent 10-Band Equalizer.
- Prevent Screen From Locking.
- Last.fm Scrobbling.
- Favorite Songs List, Most Played and Recently Added List.
- 'Stop After This Song' Function.
- New Redstone 3 Inspired UI Design.
- New Database Engine.
- Support for almost all audio formats like mp3, m4a, flac, aiff etc.
- Basic music player functions such as volume, repeat, shuffle etc.
- A music library with sorting, filtering, organizing etc.
- Lightning fast.
- Playlist import (.m3u, .pls)
- Open-source, ad-free and cost-free.
- Player state saving on close to help you continue your music experience.
- Drag and drop songs into library.
- Load songs directly for File Explorer
- Dark/Light theme and auto accent change according to song's album art.
- Real-time played song history saving.
It all sounds good, though it all rather falls apart at the moment once you hit it with a real world music library - in my case a fairly modest 15GB of music, across a few dozen artists. The startup time of the UI, i.e. before you can use the application, is over a minute. So plenty more coding needed, guys and girls. Plenty more below that needs work too!
Your view of Bread Player's UI for a good minute with a reasonable collection size - huge amounts of optimisation needed still!; (right) the hamburger menu is bread-obsessed! Bread=album, Toast=track, by the way!!
Browsing my breads, err.. I mean albums. There's no pretense at seeking out missing album art online, which is a shame. Not being able to find a single small JPG for the most famous album of all time is a bit disappointing! (cough - Amazon); (right) the Now playing screen and (a nice touch) a toast (bread theme works here - geddit?!) showing the next track that's cued up.
Off to the side of the now playing/baking screen are lyrics (not working yet) and a brief artist bio. Hey, if this can be looked up online, how come there wasn't album art for Dark Side of the Moon - it's not brain surgery, you know...
Good to see a dark theme in Settings, even if it's not on by default and even though you have to completely terminate the app in order to apply it... (right) if music and playlists aren't picked up then in theory you can import them manually here...
A built in EQ and preamp act on top of whatever the Windows 10 Mobile/Lumia Equaliser is already chucking out - leading to some nicely loud distorted music - or is that just me listening to Motorhead again?(!) Useful to have a gain control like this for old music which has been encoded very quietly though...
The search system needs a lot of work, "Melanie" had no matches, yet "Mel" found just one track - of many on my microSD. Hmm.... (right) Last.FM scrobbling is included - if that's still your 'thing'...
Regardless of the caveats, you have to hand it to open source initiatives like this, this may yet develop into something wonderful. Just don't get your hopes up too high yet! I'll revisit this project in three months and we'll see how it's getting on!