When comparing VLC vs Poweramp, the Slant community recommends Poweramp for most people. In the question“What are the best audio players for Android?” Poweramp is ranked 1st while VLC is ranked 16th. The most important reason people chose Poweramp is:
It offers a selection of themes and allows tweaking pretty much every aspect of the player UI, menus and the status bar. It even allows adjusting the zoom level of the album art among many more settings.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free, open source, and cross-platform
VLC is licensed under the CC-SA v3.0+ and available on Windows, OSX, and Linux with source code available here.
Pro Simple to setup and use
VLC is an incredibly robust application but very simple on the surface. It makes playing music simple, yet still manages to give the user all the tools he/she wants in a music player.
Pro Very versatile and easy to use
Pro Doesn't require additional codecs
Everything VLC needs to play media files is contained within which means no outside codecs are needed. This makes it one of the most hassle-free music players as it can play virtually anything as soon as it's installed.
Pro Tons of advanced settings
Besides basic configurations, video player has an extensive amount of adjustable settings.
Pro Doesn't manage your music library for you
You organize your music into folders any way you want. Want to play an album? Drag and drop. No tags, no confusion, no fluff. Easy.
Pro Can be almost completely keyboard-driven
VLC includes keyboard shortcuts for most actions. The video player can be controlled with simple and customizable keyboard commands.
Pro Surprisingly Lightest on Resources
Yes. Lightest. Even better than the ones known to be light. Both when playing music, only a single song or when playing a video. Either in terms of Ram and Cpu. Compared with almost all, including the ones from Windows like mpc-hc .. or light ones from Linux like Alsa Player, Audacious, SmPlayer .
Pro Can play every format video available (as of 2017)
Pro Supports a GUI interface and an ncurses terminal interface
Pro Can easily stream music across your home network from any device on the network
Using sftp/ssh music (and videos) can be streamed from any server on the network to any device running VLC. VLC can also be used as a webcam for streaming and snapshots. Amazing all in one package
Pro Large amount of extensions
VLC has a large amount of extensions.
Pro Highly customizable
It offers a selection of themes and allows tweaking pretty much every aspect of the player UI, menus and the status bar. It even allows adjusting the zoom level of the album art among many more settings.
Pro Great equalizer effects
PowerAMP offers hands down the best software equalizer available in an Android music player. There is a noticeable difference to the sound when using lossless files and PowerAMP's equalizer when compared to any other player in the Play Store.
Pro Compatible with many file types
PowerAMP is compatible with mp3, mp4, m4a including lossless alac, flac, ogg, wav, tta, wma, ape, and wv files.
Pro Bevy of features
With built n features such as sleep timer, lyric finder, tag editor, gap-less playback tweaks and options and advance features such as wakelock options, PoweAMP is one of the most user customizable music players on the Play Store.
Pro Sound quality is fantastic with many adjustments
Pro Free 15 day trial
PowerAMP is free trial software that allows one to use the full features of the app for a limited amount of time.
Pro Variety of Polished features
After a total overhaul to 3.0, the overall quality of the app went up.
Pro Has the best variety for shuffle I've ever seen
Pro UI overhaul for beta users
If you sign-up for the alpha - beta of the application in the playstore, you can experience the new UI design of the app.
Cons
Con Not really meant to be a music player
VLC is made to be a video player. Therefore, it won't carry out actions such as managing your music library.
Con Lacks libraries and advanced music player features
VLC is a media player first and foremost. There is no library management (aside from playlists), limited usage of tags, and no rating system. VLC is best at playing a file directly from a folder, but falls behind when it comes to helping you manage or find good songs in your music library.
Con Absence of personalization
VLC Player has only one basic interface in white or black, and overall personalization opportunities are quite narrow. Unfortunately, you're pretty much stuck to the default look.
Con Contains some insignificant but irritating flaws
Despite all keyboard shortcuts, the width of the picture can't be controlled by trackpad. Besides that, the VLC start-up window doesn’t open at the same place or the same width at which it was previously closed.
Con Only free for 15 days
Con No DLNA compliance
A missing feature for PowerAMP is DLNA compliance. So sadly that means no streaming of audio from home networks or site lockers.