Android DAP

14 Sep, 2026

I'm not certain why the idea popped into my head two weeks ago to turn my S9+ into a dedicated audio player (DAP); but the idea was there, so last week I got started on the transformation. Here's what I did to get there.

For clarification, I already had Pocket Casts, Spotify, SiriusXM, Stingray Music, Radioplayer, TuneIn Radio, etc. on the device. It was already a streaming music / podcast device, but I wanted to go even further and load my music library.

Step 1: Software

The Galaxy S9 uses Android 10, and Samsung's OneUI 2.5. It's quite out of date in terms of what Android looks like today, but it's still supported by current apps and receives updates. This is great, because one of the things I looked into (briefly) was a custom ROM to run the latest version of Android¹.

I've heard a lot about Poweramp and how great the player is, so that was the first piece of the puzzle. (Bonus—I didn't realize that Poweramp can play Apple Lossless files; I thought I was going to have to convert all my recent CD rips to a compatible format.) In the "because I can" category, I also installed Pano Scrobbler, which sends listen data to last.fm. I might turn this off, as it's listening ALL the time and I just discovered my battery is down to 46% after not using it at all this morning. I digress.

I also changed the default launcher from Samsung's OneUI to Niagara. I don't need Samsung's flourishes on the device anymore, so a simple interface is best here. Since I'm doing that, I logged out of my Samsung account on the device and used ADB to disable all the extra stuff I don't need (which includes Microsoft apps, which are installed by default because of Samsung's partnership with Microsoft). I think the only Samsung apps I left on the device are Good Lock apps, some of which I continue to use. But everything else—including the Galaxy Store—is gone.

On the Macbook side of things, I installed OpenMTP because apparently MacOS doesn't recognize the S9 for drag-and-drop. But from a software perspective, everything is now set up and good to go.

Step 2: Cleaning up the music library

I have a LOT of junk in my music library. In the mid-to-late 2000s up to the 2015s, I downloaded a lot of music "because I can". There is just way too much junk I will never listen to again. So I went through a methodical process to cull music (I'm not finished this part, yet).

A brief aside: During this process my wife decided to wipe her 2019 macbook pro and give it to me as an upgrade to my mid-2012 macbook pro; during the migration process I realized that the new macbook had 250gb storage compared to the previous 1TB...oops! I had to migrate the music to an external SSD, and then change the media location for everything in the new version of Apple Music...

Not knowing where to start, I did some searching around and the predominant suggestion was to just nuke everything, start from scratch. I didn't want to do that! And unfortunately most of the search results were DJs asking for tips on how to clean up their libraries. At this point I used Gemini to help sort things out and I got some helpful tips, the biggest being to search for any audio file with low quality—below 128kbps bitrate was my cut-off.

This wiped out a bulk of junk files right off the bat. I also went through duplicates (Apple Music has a built-in function for this), until I'm now in my final stage: going through the library letter-by-letter and deleting anything I either 1) would not buy², 2) do not recognize, or 3) is more garbage that missed the bitrate pass.

I'm using Smart Playlists to find artists beginning with the letter...I'm at H now, I believe. I did notice that in my music folder there are some artists starting with weird special characters, but I'm not sure how I'll capture those. Is there a regex function in Apple Smart Playlists? I just need a pattern match for anything that does not start with a letter A-Z³.

Step 3: Listening

I love that you can tweak the Poweramp EQ on a per-device basis! I've got it set up for a pair of BT earbuds at the moment, and next chance I'll get I'll have to set up the 3.5mm EQ.

I also need to get a bigger MicroSD card for the phone, but I'm unsure of the size yet—that depends on the size of my music library when I'm finished culling. And whether or not I want to keep my music library available on the S9 at all times.

Anyway, this has been a fun experiment! I like the way it works so far. I think I mentioned it somewhere else but using it on-the-go is still in the air, because it's the same size as my phone. I have an iPod Touch 7th generation, and it's much more "portable" in terms of a DAP.

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