Free streaming music player shootout: Dood's Music Streamer, KLastFM, QueueTube

Want free music on your Android phone? You can play its FM radio (if your phone has one), or stream online Shoutcast radio stations with WinAmp or other media players.

But what if radio is not good enough, Google Music doesn't cut it either, and you've already played the mp3s on your memory card so many times that the bits and bytes have worn out?

Then you need one of these apps. Or better yet, all of these apps:

QueueTube

QueueTube plays the sound streams of YouTube music clips. Yes, you could fire up YouTube in your web browser or use the YouTube app from Google, but QueueTube comes with a few nice extras.

If you send your browser or the YouTube app to the background or if you lock your screen the music stops playing. That's because YouTube thinks that you don't want their clips to continue when you don't look at them. YouTube won't let you make playlists either.

QueueTube keeps playing. It lets you make playlists too, and it displays album art and song lyrics. To cut a long story short: QueueTube is an excellent app if you want to use YouTube as a cloud music streaming service. Just keep in mind that YouTube is full of live tracks shot with cell phones that sound terrible, and QueueTube mixes them together with the normal music clips.

KLastFM

Last.fm is a radio with a twist. Enter an artist or band name, or a tag like triphop or death metal and last.fm will turn it into a personal radio station. It makes custom radio out of your own favourite list of artists or those of your last.fm friends too.

But last.fm doesn't like phones. It doesn't like most of the world either.

If you're from Germany, the UK, or the USA you can listen to last.fm for free, but only on your computer. If you want to listen on your phone (a tiny little computer) you have to pay. But even if you pay you're not allowed to listen to last.fm unless you are in one of the aforementioned three countries. As if the rest of the world doesn't want last.fm on the move.

KLastFM unchains last.fm by letting everyone everywhere on the planet listen to last.fm on their phones for free. Out with the geographical restrictions, because the first two letters in www mean world wide! The program interface is ugly and scrobbling is sometimes erratic, but those are minor flaws of an otherwise excellent app.

Update 1: CoboltFM and KLastFM are dead. Last.fm changed things for the worse and pulled the plug on free streaming for almost everyone. Believe it or not, most of the planet can't stream anymore even if they pay. Last.fm refugees can still stream custom radio stations from Grooveshark with Dood's Music Streamer.

Update 2: Liquid Bear still plays last.fm radio on Android.

Dood's Music Streamer

In my language dood means death, and the maker of the app lives on a website called mysticdeath.com. Don't let that scare you. Dood's Music Streamer streams music from Grooveshark. You don't need to subscribe to Grooveshark, just search for songs and play them. Dood's Music Streamer also comes with a few built-in radio stations, but they're no match for KLastFM. What makes Dood's a great app is that it plays your choice when you want it, and it does it better than QueueTube.

Dood's Music Streamer can scrobble your tracks to last.fm too. It has excellent playlist support and a pretty good widget. The only drawback is that its mp3s are only 128 kbps, but that's a Grooveshark limit and it's still better than the sound quality of KLastFM or YouTube. Dood's can also buffer the next track in the play queue for gapless playback. If you copy the buffered tracks from Dood's SD card folder you can even use it as an mp3 downloader!

Update: recent versions of Dood's have a very annoying ad banner that's so close to the tab bar that it's way too easy to click by accident. Until Dood's moves its ads to the bottom of the screen you better tame it with AdFree or AdAway. Or ditch Dood's and use TinyShark instead.

The verdict

The best cloud music streaming app is Dood's Music Streamer, but only if you get the paid version or use an ad blocker. If you don't want to do that, use TinyShark instead. You may want to keep a copy of QueueTube installed for those rare occasions where a song is not available on Grooveshark, or if you want to see the song lyrics inside the app (QueueTube) rather than in a web browser (Dood's). KLastFM and CoboltFM are the best radio apps. Liquid Bear is the best last.fm radio app. So just keep all of them. And you may want to grab a copy of WinAmp for Shoutcast radio if the stock player of your phone doesn't have Shoutcast built in.

• Dood's Media Streamer
• KLastFM and CoboltFM
• QueueTube

Update 1: CoboltFM and KLastFM are dead. Last.fm changed things for the worse and pulled the plug on free streaming for almost everyone. Believe it or not, most of the planet can't stream anymore even if they pay. Last.fm refugees can still stream custom radio stations from Grooveshark with Dood's Music Streamer.

Update 2: Liquid Bear still plays last.fm radio on Android.