One player for everything you keep
Songs, books and films each get the player they need, all reading the same files from your phone's storage. Every file is decoded by the app itself rather than by the phone's codecs, so a file plays the same on every phone — and there is no account, no streaming and no server behind any of it.
Music, artwork first
Songs, albums, artists, playlists and folders, with a recently played strip. The player puts the cover first, over a slow aurora in the cover's colours, with a seek bar drawn like a sound wave.
Lyrics that follow along
Synchronized lyrics from a .lrc file beside the track, or embedded in it, take the cover's place. Tap a line to jump there.
A book is a folder
Add any folder as an audiobook, subfolders included, in the order people read them: "Chapter 2" before "Chapter 10". Each book keeps its own place, its own speed and how much you have heard.
Made for listening to books
Skip back and forward (15 and 30 seconds, adjustable), a short rewind when you come back to a book, and a sleep timer that stops after some minutes or at the end of the chapter, with a fade.
Video, with subtitles
Turns the screen for wide videos, shows subtitles from the file or from .srt, .vtt and .ass files beside it, lets you pick the audio track, and keeps playing in picture-in-picture when you leave.
Your folders, as they are
Browse internal storage and SD cards folder by folder, with the music and videos in each. Play a folder, shuffle it, add it to the music library or a playlist, or make it a book.
Covers from your folders
A picture beside your music or audiobook, such as cover.jpg, can serve as its cover. On newer versions of Android, choose the folders that hold them once, in Settings.
Details of any file
Format, codecs, bit rate, sample rate, resolution, tags, chapters, cover and lyrics, and how often you have played it, from the ⋮ menu.
Video as sound
Play a music video or a recorded talk as sound only, without its picture being decoded. A video you are watching can carry on as sound from the same moment.
What other players get wrong
Black Forest was written to fix the things that make people give up on a media player.
It never loses your place
The position is saved every few seconds while playing, and at every pause, seek and track change. Close the app or restart the phone, and the book or video picks up where you left it.
It does not start by itself
When a car or Bluetooth headset connects and asks for music, the app stays paused unless you choose otherwise in Settings: resume audiobooks only, or resume anything.
Shuffle that is really random
Every track plays once before any repeats, and every order is equally likely. A repeating queue is reshuffled without starting on the song that just played.
Previous means previous
Previous goes to the song before — when shuffled, the one that really played before — and restarts the current song only when nothing came before it.
Calls come first
A phone or internet call pauses playback from the first ring, and it resumes when the call ends; a book goes back a few seconds first.
Unplugging pauses
Pull out the headphones or switch off the Bluetooth headset, and playback pauses instead of carrying on through the phone's speaker.
At a glance
What the app is, in the terms a store listing asks for.
- Publisher
- Methodox Technologies, Inc.
- Package name
io.methodox.blackforest_mobile_android- Requires
- Android 8.0 (API 26) or newer, 64-bit
- Plays
- Audio: MP3, AAC (M4A and M4B), FLAC, Opus, Vorbis, ALAC, AC-3, WAV and AIFF. Video: H.264, HEVC, AV1, VP9 and more, in MP4, MKV, WebM, MOV, AVI and MPEG-TS
- Permissions requested
- Reading your music and audio and your videos; notifications, for the playback controls
- Network access
- None. The app holds no
INTERNETpermission - Works with
- Bluetooth and wired headsets, the lock screen and Android's media controls
- Account
- None. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to sign in to
- Contact
- contact@methodox.io