Local music players (as opposed to online radio and cloud storage players) sometimes seem like dinosaurs now that everyone and their dog is offering a connected music option, but there are still plenty of users who prefer high-quality playback of local files. For them, the years-old PowerAmp remains a popular choice thanks to its excellent codec support, extensive equalizer, and a long list of musical creature comforts. Developer Max MP has now made version 3.0 of the app available as a public alpha; you can download the APK directly from the app's user forum.
Current Play Store version above, version 3 alpha below.
According to the developer, the biggest changes in the upcoming version are a new audio processing engine and new visualizations. Of course that's not all - there's a huge list of improvements and adjustments that are coming along for the ride, including support for third-party plugins. From the forum post:
- new audio engine
- Poweramp now uses 32-bit float sample representation
- Poweramp core DSP now uses 64-bit float internal math, helps a lot for accurate high amplification of basses
- Reverb with presets, improved StereoX effects
- Tempo control
- mp3, aac, ogg vorbis, opus and other lossy formats now decoded directly to 32-bit float representaion (no intermediate conversions)
- opus, tak, mka, dsf, dff formats support
- Poweramp now always properly fades in/out and ramps volume changes to avoid clicks and pops during any transitions (resume/pause/seek/etc.)
- Poweramp now applies gapless smoothing between gapless tracks
- Poweramp now always uses own resampler
- optional SoX very high quality resampler
- output Dithering options
- OpenSL optimized output
- support for 3rd party plugins (DSP/Decoder/Output)
- visualizations
- full support for milkdrop presets
- v1 and v2 (with shaders) presets supported. Support for v2 presets is best on OpenGL ES 3.0 enabled devices
- milkdrop presets can be loaded from sdcard and downloaded as APKs from Play
- support for 3rd party preset APKs
- spectrum visualizations
- main player right drawer for fast Equ/DSP/Visualizations access
- many other changes, more changes are planned
Unfortunately there are a few limitations as well. Only ARM-based hardware is supported in this early version, so if your phone or tablet has an Intel logo on the back, stick to the Play Store. Skins are also unsupported, if only because the user interface isn't nailed down at the moment. Current PowerAmp users can install this alpha build over version 2 and retain their premium purchases.
Source: PowerAmp forumThanks: Can