Booming Music is an offline Android player built around synced lyrics

Lyrics are the feature, not an add-on

Most Android music players treat lyrics as a lookup table. Booming Music is built the other way around, and the feature list shows it. Automatic lyrics download and editing comes first, so you can fetch a lyric file, sync it and correct it without leaving the app. Word-by-word synced lyrics give real-time playback with word-level timing rather than line-level. Translated lyrics support displays dual-language lyrics through TTML or LRC with translations. The screenshot set backs this up, with separate screens for immersive full lyrics, lyrics inside the player and a lyrics editor. For a listener whose main interaction with a song is reading along, that is the part that decides whether the app is usable, and it is the part the project has clearly spent its effort on. The stated tagline is modern design, pure sound, fully yours, and the primary language is Kotlin with Material You dynamic theming throughout.

Sound features: equalizer, AutoEq, gapless and ReplayGain

The audio side is where a music player either earns trust or loses it, and this one covers the ground. There is a built-in equalizer with up to 15 fully configurable bands and customisable profiles. AutoEq support lets you import professionally tuned headphone correction profiles. Gapless playback gives smooth transitions between songs with zero interruption. ReplayGain support maintains consistent volume across tracks, which is the feature that matters most on a phone with a fixed output level. Bluetooth and headset controls are handled, and Android Auto integration is supported for hands-free use in the car. A sleep timer stops playback after a set time, and the topics list includes media3, which is the AndroidX media playback stack, so the playback layer is built on the platform's own media components rather than something custom.

Library management with a MediaStore dependency

The library features are conventional but thorough. Folder browsing lets you play songs directly from any folder. A tag editor changes song metadata such as title, artist and album information. Automatic artist images downloads artwork so the library looks finished. Library filtering lets you exclude or include folders with blacklist and whitelist options, which is how people who keep their music in a specific folder structure cope with a phone that also has ringtones and voice memos. Smart playlists generate lists such as Recently Played, Most Played and History. The one thing the roadmap flags is an independent library scanner with no MediaStore dependency, which is the tell that the current library is built on the platform's media store. That is a reasonable default for most users and a limitation for anyone syncing a collection in a way MediaStore does not model.

Scrobbling, widgets and the offline promise

Two features cut across the rest. Native scrobbling syncs listening history with Last.fm and ListenBrainz, with no third-party app in the middle. And the topics list includes offline, which is consistent with a player that has no streaming component in its feature set at all: there is no mention of a catalogue service, no radio, no recommendations, and every feature in the list is about files already on the device. Widgets provide lock screen and home screen controls for quick access, and the screenshot gallery shows the player in two visual variants, an expressive one and a gradient one, alongside a favourites screen and a sound settings screen. The tag editor, the EQ screen and the AutoEq import screen each get their own screenshot too, which is a reasonable proxy for how much of the interface is settings.

Where to get it, and what you are agreeing to

The app is distributed widely, and the list of channels is itself information about the project's priorities. There is a Google Play Store listing, an F-Droid package under `com.mardous.booming`, an IzzyOnDroid package, GitHub releases, an OpenAPK mirror and an Obtainium link. Obtainium in particular is a client that tracks a repository and builds the app for you, so a signed release from the project's own GitHub is the most direct path if you would rather not use a store. The F-Droid package id is `com.mardous.booming`, and the README notes that the F-Droid version may lag the Play Store version, since the store build includes review and update prompts the free build does not need. There is a `PERMISSIONS.md` at the repository root, which is worth reading before installing, because a feature set this broad implies a broad permission surface. The licence is GPLv3, and the project follows a Contributor Covenant, with translations managed on hosted Weblate.

The roadmap shows where the library model is heading

The roadmap is short and worth reading as a statement of direction. An independent library scanner with no MediaStore dependency is first on the list, which confirms the MediaStore coupling is a known limitation being worked on rather than a design choice. Multi-artist support follows, described as splitting and indexing properly, which is the classic messy-data problem in music collections where one track belongs to several artists and naive indexing produces a mess. Improved genre handling is next, then Last.fm integration for importing and exporting playback data, which is a different feature from the scrobbling the app already has. Enhanced artist pages to separate albums and singles visually, and integration with Jellyfin and Navidrome, are the last two. None of these are checked off. For an evaluator, that is the useful information: the app is stable and released, but the library layer and the server integration are both still in progress, and the last push to the repository was on 2026-09-28 with the v1.4.2 release the same day.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt Booming Music if you want an offline Android player whose lyrics are a first-class feature rather than an afterthought, and you are willing to grant playback and notification permissions. Skip it if you want a simple audio player with a small permission surface, since the feature set assumes a metadata-rich library. Before you install, read PERMISSIONS.md, since the app is deliberately feature-heavy, and note the roadmap item for an independent library scanner, because the current library depends on MediaStore.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: GPL-3.0
2. mardous/BoomingMusic on GitHub
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases