Listening to music is a favourite pass-time for millions of people in the United Kingdom. The emotions that certain music can make individuals feel is unique and is a reason why music apps are so popular.
While most music apps rely on the internet to stream, there are a few out there which incorporate offline listening in to the equation, too.
In this article, we are going to look at the best music apps around which allow users to enjoy their favourite music without being connected to wi-fi or mobile data.
Best offline music apps that work without Wi-Fi
Soundcloud
Soundcloud is one of the oldest music players still around after being launched nearly 15 years ago as website.
Now, as an app, Soundcloud offers plenty of music related features including the ability to listen to your favourite tracks while offline.
To enable this feature, you first of all need to sign up to either Soundcloud Go for £7.99 a month or Soundcloud Go+ for £12.99 a month.
This also gives you an ad-free experience, access to a Quiet mode and the ability to highlight tracks in your music library.
Both services allow you to download and listen to music offline but Soundcloud Go+ also offers the following features:
- Ad-free listening
- Access to Soundcloud’s full catalogue of music
- High-quality audio
- Mix tracks within select DJ apps
Once you’ve decided which premium Soundcloud service to subscribe to, you will need to know how to make the most of the offline listening option.
Simply browse the app for any songs, playlists or apps that you want to listen to offline and save them to your library by tapping the like button next to them.
Once you’ve done this, head to your library and you should see the download option next to all of your ‘liked’ tracks.
To avoid having to manually go through this process each time you want to gain access to songs while offline, you can go in to your Soundcloud settings and tick the box next to ‘save automatically’ under the ‘offline listening settings’ tab.
This will mean that all you need to do from then on is click the like button on your favourite tracks and they will automatically become available for offline use.
When it comes to free online music apps, this is one of the better options – but it’s worth noting that if you want to listen to songs offline, you’ll need to sign up to the premium version.
So, check the free version out when you’ve got a data connection and see whether the user friendly interface and large library is right for you.
Spotify
While you may be looking at this and wondering why Spotify has made this list when it does rely on an internet connection for the majority of its features, it does actually have offline listening as a key part of its functionality.
Add in the fact that it’s the most successful and popular music app out there and it would be foolish to not consider it when it comes to offline listening.
To gain access to offline listening on Spotify, you first of all need to ensure that you have downloaded albums or playlists via the app when you do have access to the internet.
To do this, find the albums and playlists that you want to have access to while offline and select the download icon. These tracks will then be stored in the downloaded tab within your library on Spotify.
In order to gain access to this offline section you will need a Spotify Premium account. This comes at a price of £9.99 a month for an individual, £13.99 a month for duos, and £16.99 for a family.
Due to the fact that Spotify is recognised as the premier music streaming service worldwide, you will have access to download the biggest and best albums ever made by the biggest and best artists in history.
Therefore, the prices for premium are pretty reasonable in our opinion. There’s a reason why the Spotify app is the most popular – audio quality is exceptional and the user experience is better than any competitor.
Other major music streaming services such as Apple Music and Amazon Music also provide users with the ability to download tracks and listen to them offline in a similar fashion to Spotify.
You can check our full Spotify review more deeper insight, but all in all Spotify Music is a great choice for both online streaming but also great to listen to all your offline songs too.
Deezer
Deezer is the final app that we’d like to discuss in regards to offline music listening. You can create your own music library in Deezer incredibly easily, making your own playlist filled with your favourite music tracks.
This is a really slick app that focuses equally on podcasts and music, all of which can be downloaded and listened to when not connected to the internet.
When you first load the app up, you are asked to select which artists you are most likely to listen to in order for the app to gain an understanding of your music interests.
This will then gear how the app personalises its recommendations to you going forward.
Once you’ve got a feel for the app, you will quickly notice than in order to listen to songs, playlists, podcasts and albums offline you will need to subscribe to Deezer Premium.
Head to the Premium section of the app on the bottom menu bar and select whether you want the standard premium service for £14.99 a month or the family premium service and split the costs with others for £21.99 a month.
Both services are currently offering you a free one month trial so you can try before you buy.
The features offered to Deezer premium users, in addition to offline listening, are as follows:
- Ad-free listening
- High fidelity sound
- Supported audio devices: Sony, Sonos, Devialet, Harman Kardon, Denon, Bang & Olufsen, Cabasse and more.
As you can see, Deezer focuses heavily on sound quality in a bid to separate themselves from more popular streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music.
However, back to the main point of offline listening. In order to do this, you have to download all of your favourite songs via the app.
Once you’ve done this, you then need to head to the settings app and activate ‘offline mode’.
From then, you will only be able to see all the songs which are available to listen to offline meaning that you avoid any confusion over which songs you have access to and which you don’t.
Conclusion
To conclude, there are numerous apps out there which allow you to listen to music offline, however they all come at a cost.
For the sake of brand and quality guarantee, we would lean towards recommending Spotify as the number one option for offline music but each app we’ve mentioned above all perform the task well.
Fingers crossed that in the years to come, an app is developed which allows offline music free of charge.
