Modizer 17+

So much potential wasted by bugs

Amazing little MOD player app with lots of cool real-time visualizations, a built-in file browser, playlist editor/manager, multiple underlying playback engines (including OpenMPT), and automatic online database search.

Sadly, bugs plague this badly-neglected app. On iPad Pro 10", trying to use the pattern scroll visualizer causes the app to crash. On iPhone, you can get the app to crash in various edge cases (example: open the app and hit "play" to play the last song the app previously played, and the app will crash if the underlying file for that song has been deleted/moved and no longer exists). It's a very frustrating app to use with all the crashing.

I have to give it at least 4 stars for being the ONLY app of its kind in the App Store and for using the highly-compatible OpenMPT playback engine. But I have to deduct a star for the crashes and lack of updates.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for your feedback. There were 2 recent updates, 3.3 & 3.4.
3.4 should improve significantly the stability, please check

Good, but has issues

Overall probably the best mod/vgm player on the app store. It plays custom formats (amiga, arcade, genesis, etc) very accurately and supports a huge number of formats. The ability to download your favorite music from inside the app is fantastic. I also really like that you can easily view information stored in the custom formats, for example HVSC notes. But now for the bad news… Unfortunately, there are two pretty big issues: 1) trying to download from some integrated menus like vgmrips causes an instant app crash 100% of the time, and it’s been this way for months, which means I’m stuck with whatever songs I’ve already downloaded before this bug was introduced. Being unable to download new music on a music app seems like it should be a high priority to fix. 2) navigating through your music library and playlists is really confusing, it’s easy to get lost and hard to find the music you want sometimes. I’m not a user interface designer so I have no suggestions on how to fix it, I just know that it’s not very intuitive.

Our choices for custom format game music playback on mobile devices is incredibly limited, and so this is probably your best option. Just know beforehand that there are going to be some rather large annoyances while using it.

I love/hate this app.

Modizer has some awesome things about it and some terrible things about it. The awesome is that it plays just about all of the modern file formats used for legacy game music. You can literally have thousands of game soundtracks from platforms like NES, Genesis, and arcade, to less popular stuff like Atari ST, PC-88, and MSX. The interface for adding new OSTs is intuitive, the tracks are usually bit accurate, and they take up barely any room at all.

But it’s not all roses. The playlist functionality is unusable, and the random track feature only plays the first tracks out of any given pack.

By far the most frustrating issue, however, is the fact that the app periodically needs to “update the database”. I don’t know what is in this database, but it takes FOREVER to update. Case in point, today I tried to do it, and gave up after about 20 minutes. You have to click update, and leave your phone alone, because if you put the app in the background, it will reset and you’ll have to start over the next time you try to use the app. This basically forces you to choose between not using your phone or not using the app, every few weeks or month or however often it gets an updated database. As much as I love the pros of this app, I don’t love it enough to put up with such nonsense.

Developer Response ,

Hi,
sorry for the database problem. It looks the database is too big/need some maintenance.
Database is updated at each new version 1st launch.
Could you please try to launch a DB cleanup => "More/Maintenance/Clean Database".
If you still have the issue, please reset the DB => "More/Maintenance/Reset Database".
Playlists have been improved in upcoming v3.1 (under review by apple right now) + the issue of the random track feature only selecting first entry in archive has been fixed as well.