[Android Apps and Games] John Morton:
Pulsar is, without a doubt, my favourite Android music play. Vastly better than any of the stock players shipped from the mobile vendors, that's for sure! And I particularly like the way half the bugs I ran into while catching up with this discussion have been fixed in the latest version.

Some remaining bugs:

* When using artist/album sort in the Album view, if you drag the page slider down it pops up a bubble with the letter of the area of the list/grid you're up to, but the letter is linked to the album, rather than the artist

* Whatever you did to notifications in the 1.3.8 release has resulted in track titles and playing times being pushed out to my Pebble, which is excellent! However, the start time doesn't appear to get properly set when transitioning between tracks, so the progress meter stops working, just sitting at the end time. If the next track is longer than the last track, the start time starts at the last track's end time. This seems to be true for sequential play and pressing the next/prev buttons, however pausing the track sets the current time correctly. So something's not making it out to the notification?

* Chromecasting ogg/vorbis files stalls and plays nothing. Casting FLAC plays, but the playback stutters. I had to spend about an hour trying various different Chromecast capable players to find one that did work with vorbis files, and it does the same thing with FLAC, so it seems the Chromecast APIs are kind of hard to work with. My guess for the FLAC case is that the streaming rate is set for mp3 sized files and simply not enough data is being pushed to the device for FLAC sized files. But that might be a Chromecast bug. Seems you'll have to find a few examples of each kind of officially supported file type to confirm they work :-/

* The shuffle button in the individual album or artist views doesn't really behave as I'd expect it. Really, I'd assume that sequential versus shuffle is a state the player is in, one that persists until it's explicitly toggled back to the other. What seems to be the case here is that pressing the shuffle button puts the player in shuffle mode, but without changing the button in any way. Your visual feedback is just that the current track probably changes to another, and that next/prev and end of track progression is random. However, pause puts you back into sequential mode, which is unexpected (as does selecting another track by touching on it in that screen). I'd ideally prefer a control that shows both the current state of the player's track selection, and an obvious indicator that this is the right (and only) place to change that, but I'm not sure you can do that without using two buttons. Hopefully the Material designs docs have some good guidance?

Feature requests (esay ones):

* Filtering out the Album view so it only shows one instance of an album for compilation albums with many artists is great, but it's hard to predict which artist gets to be displayed, which makes finding them in artist/album sort challenging. I suggest renaming the 'artist' to 'Various Artist' (or similarly i18n string) inside the list, and possibly even sorting them to a special position at the beginning or end of the list.

* Doing a similar trick in the Artists view when filtering out artists with only a couple of tracks to their name might be useful for retaining compilation albums.

* +1 for the previous feature request for sorting albums by year of publication

* In the queue or playlists the move tracks button is a four way arrow which is a bit misleading as you can only move up or down — but, you could make swipe to the left an action to remove a track from the playlist. This is slightly counter-intuitive to us left to right readers, but as there is no room to swipe to the right, as that's where the button is, if you're icon is just up, down and left arrows, that should be easy enough to figure out. I'd make sure left swipe actions make it to at least half of the screen before removing, so people don't accidentally wobble while moving positions up and down (I'd want a bit of wiggle room in the up and down, when swiping to remove, so you can't make one direction of movement necessarily trump another). Would also be nice if tracks below the removed tracks move up, but tracks above always remain stationary, so you can quickly remove tracks working from bottom to top.

Feature requests (more work):

+1 for the request for ReplayGain support. Bit harder than the others as it will require some research, but a lot of players support it, so it's probably not too hard to do. Bonus points for making it work in conjunction with Chromecast :)

Thanks for a great app!