Offline music player for iPad/iPhone?

Any suggestions for such a player that enables music to be loaded to the iPad/iPhone from a computer without using iTunes? I find iTunes highly irritating, and want something where I can simply copy from my music store. It has to be able to play flac, to save any recoding, and has to be able to play albums gapless.

The best I have found so far is Offline Music Player, which is very easy to use but has two irritations, the first serious: it doesnt play gspless, and with flac it does not recognise albums so it is necessary to complile the tracks of each album into a playlist in lieu.

An alternative to a player on the iDevice, would be a program on the computer that can upload to the device in a way that fools the inbuilt Apple Music into thinking it is from iTunes.

I gave trying to get decent music out of anything Apple and bought a Fiio X5.

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iTunes annoyed me so much, I bought a Core.

I rip my CDs to FLAC using XLD on my mac. I play back using VLC on the mac. I also have a FiiO M3K for use on the go.

For clarification, my request for player and/or file transfer suggestions relates to use of the phone & pad purely for portable music when travelling - nothing whatsoever to do with the home system.

And I don’t spend enough time travelling to justify a separate player, when have one or other of these devices with me already for their many other function. (And capable of good enough sound quality given the headphones I have, and in the environments used.)

I would try VLC or Onkyo HF Player. Both work pretty well.

Thanks for those suggestions ChrisSU.

Just tried VLC, and it is better than Offline Music Player in that it allows upload of album folders as opposed to only music files, and shows them as albums. However it also does not do gapless play.

Then tried Onkyo - but as far as I can see it still requires ITunes to upload, which is my bugbear with the otherwise OK Apple Music. [EDIT: Ah, i found that it is possible to upload files through, but not using, iTunes. The trouble is that whilst iTunes shows it as having oploaded I can’t test in Onkyo because playing from the location they go to that way is only available through the purchaseable version, and it seems you can’t try before buying! But playing the files it sees in the iTunes library it does manage gapless, so that is promising, and probably worth the £10 punt if nothing else does the trick.]

This lack of gapless play is something I had never experienced before, though often read people complaining about it on mainstram systems. Having experienced it on iThingy I am shocked that any proper players suffer from it, though on a free phone app it may be more excusable, if unacceptable.

I asked a similar question on the old forum.

I think the best solution I found was MusicStreamer, but that’s not perfect either.

It can access media servers on the LAN and download files for offline play, I think it did gapless ok, but need to check again - for some reason it’s not seeing all my albums currently.

Also metadata/filenames may throw it - for example I just downloaded Kate Bush’s Aerial to the app to try the second part which is gapless - annoyingly it seems to have used the filenames to determine play order so ‘disc 1’ has tracks named 01-xx-yyyy, disc 2 has tracks named 02-xx-yyyy - it ignores the ‘disc number’ in the filename so I have 2 of each track number so track 1 of disc 1 is followed by track 1 of disc 2 and so forth. Hmmm, could of course be Qobuz interesting metadata :tired_face:

foobar2000 is your best bet.

I think the Onkyo app is pretty good, so probably worth a tenner! Then you can use it to load albums from your NAS/music store, including DSD etc.

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