Enjoying music is an important element of driving. It’s what allows me to truly appreciate the nice weather, stay focused on the road ahead, and drown out some of the road noise while driving a two-ton electric pickup truck. Although mobile Internet has improved tremendously over the last decade, it is still not entirely perfect, especially when driving on the highway at 70 MPH. That’s where offline playback and the ability to save music really shines.
I have completely changed Spotify to Jellyfinand although the official Jellyfin mobile apps are decent enough for streaming, there is no offline playback support. That’s where Symfonium comes into play. This is the best Jellyfin app for playing music on Android and it supports everything I need from a music app and more. A great user interface, reliable playback for when you use the Internet, and a small enough size with full Android Auto support.
Jellyfin is the perfect backend
The best open source media streaming service
After switching from Plex to Jellyfin, I’ve come to appreciate a lighter approach to handling streaming media. Offline playback is now more important than ever when we are constantly on the move inside fast-moving vehicles. Getting it right with Android Auto is vital to ensuring a distraction-free ride. There’s nothing worse than music not streaming properly while driving or something else happening on your phone that draws attention.
If you have a large music collection, like I do from accumulating too many albums, you’ll have hours of entertainment waiting to be streamed to all your devices. But simply launching the official app and calling it a day is not good for vehicles as there is no offline support, nor Android Auto Works well with the app. So I went to the Google Play Store to see if there was a third party app available that could connect to my server at home.
Symfonium is the king of Android Auto music
I’m always listening on the go
I don’t think it’s necessary to stream movies or shows while on the go. It’s always music. Sure, there are times when I open a Jellyfin stream to watch some visual content when I’m resting somewhere, but that’s where internet connectivity should be at least more reliable than inside a vehicle. For driving, it’s always the music, and that’s precisely what makes Symfonium so good. It is designed from the ground up to handle large music collections, all stored on Jellyfin.
Symfonium is actually something that made me ditch my old iPhone 12 and iOS app manet, which would often stop playing completely if the signal dropped for a moment. Symfonium waits and reconnects without human intervention. I try to have as many playlists as possible saved locally, but sometimes I need to resort to streaming, and Manet continued to have problems, while Symfonium seems to be much more robust.
Then there’s multi-source support, so you can display Jellyfin and Plex albums side by side, with curated Navidrome playlists ready to go. That’s the only thing I’d like to see change with Jellyfin: better official apps, but to be fair, the platform is developed for free and there are viable third-party alternatives that not only do the job as well as required, but also allow us to support other developers. As a side note, if you use free and open source software and there is a donation method, consider doing so.
It’s simply a brilliant music player.
For me, one of the highlights of Symfonium is its offline support, whether it’s smart caching while streaming or generating sound waves with downloaded tracks. It’s ideal for longer trips where the signal can be sketchy at best or even for long-haul flights when Wi-Fi is exorbitantly expensive and sometimes unreliable 35,000 feet in the air. There’s support for high-resolution formats, gapless playback, playback queue management, and even the ability to connect your phone to Chromecast.
But it stays out of the way, which is precisely what I need from a music player, especially one that runs Android Auto. This should be the goal of anyone looking to equip their phone with apps for the trips ahead. You’ll want to have as few distractions as possible, and having solid applications like Symfonium at the ready is precisely what’s required. Gone are the days where I had to stop and spend a couple of minutes trying to figure out why something isn’t working.
