Above Average Player, but.... – Flacbox: Hi-Res Music Player Review

FINAL UPDATE: I gave up on Flacbox. The App has some very good features, however, the implementation is lacking. It has been over 5 months since the last update, even though users have identified several problems. It's possible that the devs have abandoned the project.. DELETED FLACBOX... UPDATE: Since writing my initial review, I have encountered other problems, specifically.. ** After working with the “Music Library” for over 8 hours it was not very pleasant.. I had to play so many songs several times, to get the “Album” and “Artists” category’s to populate with the album and artists information.. During the process I encountered so many crashes that I lost count.. Each time the App would crash, some of the information would be lost and I would have to go back and redo it over again.. Because of the glitches and crashes, it will take weeks just to get the Music Library setup.. ** Also, the “Audio Player” does not always display with the Album Covers when a song is played. Clicking on the blank area will make the Album Cover appear, however, doing that can also cause a random crash.. ** There is obviously coding issues in the App, or it could be compatibility problems with IOS 11.. Either way it needs to be fixed. ** By design, ALL songs (tracks) are dumped into the “Music Library”.. This includes the iTunes/iPod library, files that are physically loaded by the user in “Files” and files that have been downloaded from the internet.. This concept might be alright for many users, but in my opinion it makes it somewhat difficult to keep such a large amount of songs organized.. True, the user could just create playlists for each group of songs, but to me that is a lot of extra work and effort.. ** Even considering the problems that I have encountered, I do like Flacbox... I just hope that the devs will continue to update the App and will fix any problems in a future release.. —————————————————————————- INITIAL REVIEW BELOW: Overall, Flacbox is a very good audio player, however, I have encountered several important issues. 1. The song timer control (the slider) will randomly stop, especially if you switch to a different screen while a song is being played. 2. The song timer control is not always accurate when the end of the song is reached.. i.e, sometimes when the countdown reaches “-0:00” and the song is not finished playing, the timer will continue past “-0:00” and then the countdown will display “-59:59” and will continue to countdown until the song ends. THIS WILL SOMETIMES RESULT IN A RANDOM CRASH.... 3. Album Covers DO NOT automatically generate and populate any Playlists. This happens when the Music Library is opened, as well as for playlists created from audio files physically added to the App. This happens even though the audio files have an Album Cover (Cover Art) embedded into them. The only way that I have found to display Album Covers is to play each song separately. That’s very annoying, especially if you have a large music library.. From what I can tell, this has something to do with the way the App “caches” Album Covers... 4. The App “Caches” ALL Album Covers, even if the audio files already have them embedded into the file.. This action results in a large amount of storage space being unduly wasted. (I have over 1000 audio files physically added to the App. I’ve played about 75 songs and already the “Album Cover Cache” is over 100MBs.) As far as I’m concerned, this is unacceptable. I can understand caching Album Covers retrieved for songs that are downloaded from the internet, but not for files that have been physically added by the user. The App should be able to display Album Covers embedded into audio files without having to cache them.... As I stated, Flacbox is a very good player and it does have potential, but it does have some problems. Hopefully the devs will address and fix these problems in the near future...
Review by GggMmm.. on Flacbox: Hi-Res Music Player.