Looking for a music player app for your Android device that looks great, or at least better than the currently available alternatives on the app store? If yes, then look no further than Now Playing, a recently released music player for Android, with a cool and beautiful interface.

Now Playing’s interface is based on Google Now’s (the search app Google introduced with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean) card-like structure. Everything is neatly arranged, with the whole UI made up of a white background and grey buttons that looks simple, neat, yet visually quite good. It follows Android’s Holo app design guidelines pretty closely – you can swipe between songs or artists or albums lists, long-press on items to add them to queue or playlists, and more, and it is all extremely smooth and pleasing to look at.

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The screen which shows the currently playing song is also neatly presented and is quite intuitive – the album art is shown by default, but you can swipe to the right to see more songs in the respective album, or swipe to the left to head to the lyrics section. If you’re using the phone in landscape mode, then both the album art and lyrics are shown at once.

When it comes to downloading album art and lyrics for songs, Now Playing is perhaps the fastest music app I’ve run across, almost instantly downloading lyrics when it can find them. Some songs’ lyrics do fail to download, but the developer will be adding more lyrics sources in future versions so that will (hopefully) be a non-issue soon.

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For an early version, Now Playing is quite functional. You have at your disposal two widgets, large and small, that look really nice and minimalistic thanks to a transparent background, though you can decide what background you want for them. If you’re on Android 4.1 and above, you also have an actionable notification that lets you play/pause, skip, as well as close Now Playing.

There are a few issues and limitations though. For one, Now Playing has a habit of force closing every now and then, though music continues to run and re-opening the app seems to resume everything. Also, you can’t mass add songs to a playlist (a limitation found in many other music apps), so you’ll need to add each song one by one then save the playlist, which is tiresome. The app is still in a beta stage so these things are expected, but hopefully they’ll get fixed in future updates.

Now Playing isn’t available on the Play Store yet, so you’ll have to manually download and install it. If a smooth and beautiful music player is what you’re looking for, then Now Playing should fit the bill perfectly, so be sure to try it out – it might just become your music player of choice after a few more updates add more functionality and features.

Head to the link below to download Now Playing, and don’t forget to follow the developer on Google+ or Twitter to keep up with updates on development. Instructions for installing Now Playing manually are given below.

Download Now Playing

How to Install Now Playing

  1. Download the APK file for the app from the download link above.
  2. Copy the downloaded file to your device.
  3. Enable “Unknown sources” under the Settings » Security (Settings » Applications on Gingerbread) menu on the device, so that you can manually install apps from the SD card. On Android 4.2, you’ll have to first unhide the Developer options menu by going into Settings » About phone then clicking on the Build Number field seven times.
  4. You’ll need a file manager to browse through SD Card. You can install OI file manager or ES File Explorer or any other file manager app from the Play Store if needed.
  5. Open file manager and navigate to where you transferred the APK file. Tap on the file to begin installation procedure and it will be installed in less than a minute.
  6. Now Playing is now installed on your device and can be accessed via the app drawer on your device. To install updates, follow the same procedure after downloading the latest version.