Published on May 3rd, 2014 | by Wrishiraj Kaushik

FlipBeats music player: Simplicity without compromise

Preface

If you want a music player that is fun and easy to use, or maybe you want one that gives you more control over your music, FlipBeats might be the one you are looking for. While browsing Google Play for a good music app, I stumbled upon it. After installing I found it quite unique and interesting. Here’s the complete review.

Promo Video:

Test bed

Moto G running Android 4.4 Kitkat.

User eXperience – Features vs Simplicity

FlipBeats tries to be two things at once – Provide a simple UI and give users lots of customizing options (Linux users read: KDE). FlipBeats is a very visual heavy application, with beautiful tiles representing various elements of the application, and nice colourful visualization when playing music.

Beautiful interface, shows album art and nice visualization when playing music. The colour scheme of the app can be changed according to user preference.

When you open the app, you are greeted with a home screen with album art, the screen is split into tiles of Songs, Albums, Playlists and Genres. You can flip the tiles to access the next item (Hence the name FlipBeats). This is a nice and innovative way of navigation indeed.

FlipBeats offers a lot of EQ options, with Basic presets such Dance, Deep, Hip-Hop, Jazz etc. and Advance option to allows you configure every bit of your music, with endless possibilities. For general users, it is not necessary to customize every single bit to get it working, you can simply start playing music with the default settings; but for power-users, you can do a lot of things to make your music sound like you want it. There are also two presets marked as “Pro” (and Exclusive), and I must admit that the Pro Equalizers made Katy Perry sound better to my ears (she’s awesome anyway).

FlipBeats comes with lots of EQ settings, something that true music lovers and power users will like.

I really liked how they have packaged the best of both worlds in one single app. The app even cares about your ears. When Sound Health profile is activated, the app does not allow high volume that may damage your ears. Nice!

Stability

Well, we generally do not talk about “stability” of an entertainment app on mobiles, but I’d like to change the trend a bit because stability is a key part of entertainment. A buggy app can ruin your afternoon, while a stable app can make you smile.

While the app was fun to use, it was crashing. It crashed during start-up and also in middle of operation. This is disappointing and annoying, considering the pros of the app. This is an early release, and we hope things will improve as more and more bugs are fixed by the developers.

Price and Conclusion

FlipBeats is priced at $1.99 at Google Play, which is a fair price for a player of its kind. You can download for free and try it for 20 days, after which you’ll need to pay for the full version. If you like the app, $1.99 is worth it. At the time of writing, they are also giving a special discount of 50%, making the price $0.99.

I give this app a rating of 7 out of 10. Can be given a 8, if the minor stability issues are fixed.

Tags: beautiful, equalizer, features, flip, FlipBeats, music, player, simplicity, UI, visualization

About the Author

Wrishiraj Kaushik Software entrepreneur by profession and geek by design, I'm an open source advocate and I've great interest in science and technology of all kind.