I’ve always kept a small music library on my phone, so I’ve tried a lot of offline players. The paid apps are usually great, but most of the free ones are packed to the gills with ads. That’s why I dug up a few good ad-free alternatives.

What you need from a music player can be as different as your music taste. I’d love an app that has a clean, material-themed interface and no ads. Some want finer equalizer controls or effects. Others need maximum compatibility for music file formats.

You might just need the app to keep your offline music collection in one place. In that case, you’ll want easy metadata management (lyrics, album art, tags, track info, and such).

Then it’s the small touches that you can take into account. For example, people who like listening to entire albums would appreciate a gapless playback feature. Even if you only ever stream music, an offline music app can help you build and keep a library of podcasts and audiobooks.

I tried to put together a healthy mix of apps, so there should be something here for most people. I’ve also tried to highlight the best features of each app to help you pick.

“Simple and rational,” reads the Auxio description. When you first open the app, it’ll load every single audio file saved on your phone. Auxio will neatly organize them into tracks, albums, artists, and genres. You can tweak these tabs in settings. You can also exclude or include on-device folders in settings to remove non-songs.