Rhythm vs SAF Media Scanner
Side-by-side comparison of two open source alternatives
Rhythm
Your Music, Your Rhythm Experience your music collection like never before. Rhythm is a beautiful, open-source Material You music player built for audiophiles, supporting both local and streaming playback. Enjoy high-quality audio with zero tracking and absolutely no ads. 🔊 Audiophile-Grade Sound • High-Res Audio: Preserves native sample rates and bit depths for pure, unaltered sound. • Advanced EQ: Perfect your audio with a 10-band equalizer and over 6,000 AutoEQ presets tailored to your specific headphones. • Premium Playback: Enjoy true gapless playback and support for all major formats (FLAC, ALAC, Opus, WAV, MP3, OGG, and Dolby Atmos/EAC3-JOC). 🎨 Gorgeous Material 3 Design • Dynamic Colors: The app's theme adapts beautifully to your wallpaper (Android 12+) and the current album artwork. • Fluid UI: Experience expressive shapes, smooth animations, and an immersive, distraction-free lyrics view. • Responsive Widgets: Control your music straight from your home screen with modern Material 3 layouts. 📚 Smart Library & Lyrics • Dual-Mode Playback: Seamlessly switch between your local music library and streaming servers. • Synced Lyrics: Sing along with word-by-word highlighting via LRCLib, or use the local editor for custom offsets. • Ultimate Organization: Browse your music by Songs, Albums, Artists, Genres, Playlists, or Folders. • Multi-Select Power: Manage your queue, share, or delete multiple tracks at once with batch actions. • Reliable Scanning: A full-scan media scanner ensures no songs are ever missed. ⚙️ Feature-Packed • Rhythm Guard: Integrated hearing safety system with age-aware volume protection. • Built-in metadata editor with artwork integration from Deezer and YouTube Music. • Sleep timer, playback statistics, and stability tools for a crash-free experience. • Easy queue management and M3U playlist import/export. • In-app auto-updates directly from GitHub. 🔒 100% Private Rhythm respects your data. There are no ads, no analytics, and no accounts required. It is completely offline-capable and proudly open-source (GPL v3).
SAF Media Scanner
Scans SAF (Storage Access Framework) paths for audio files and builds a database to be used by Unpopular Music Player or Opus 1 Music Player. Contrary to the Android service it knows about composers, works, movements, conductors etc. Application Field: * The SAF scanner can access USB memory devices, like USB sticks via OTG adapter, in Android 6, 7 and 8. Note that Android 9 and 10 natively allow (read) file access to USB memory, just like to SD cards. * The SAF scanner can extract album art on SD cards and USB memory devices, this is currently not possible with the classical scanner, because without SAF it is limited to read-only access. * The SAF scanner can access SMB or SFTP servers, if the respective document provider is installed. * The SAF scanner even deals with non-seekable files by reading them completely into memory before further processing. Features: * Can be run manually whenever audio files have been added, removed or changed. * Auto scan (incremental) or complete scan (rebuild) selectable. * Various audio file types (mp3, mp4, flac, ogg, ...). * Multi CD albums: sub-subdirectories "CD1", "CD2", ..., with common folder image. * Common and non-common text tags. * Composer and grouping (work, movements). * Proprietary Apple iTunes tags for classical music. * Extracting of embedded images if none already exists. * Downscaling of both extracted and existing album images. * Original images can be kept as backup, if desired. * Maximum image size is configurable. * Creates a standard SQLite database in /ClassicalMusicDb that can be accessed from PC or other apps.
| Feature | Rhythm | SAF Media Scanner |
|---|---|---|
| License | GPL-3.0-only | GPL-3.0-only |
| Install sources | F-DroidGitHubIzzyOnDroid | F-Droid |
| Categories | MusicMedia PlayerVideo | MusicMedia PlayerVideo |
| Features | Ad-FreeOpen SourceNo Tracking | Ad-FreeOpen SourceNo Tracking |
| Platforms | Android | Android |
| Website | ||
| Source code |