Enjoying music is an important element of the drive. It's what allows me to truly appreciate the good weather, remain focused on the road ahead, and drown out some of the road noise from driving a two-ton electric pickup. Although mobile internet has improved massively over the last decade, it's still not quite perfect, especially when traversing along a highway at 70 MPH. That's where offline playback and being able to save music really shine.

I've fully switched from Spotify to Jellyfin, and while the official Jellyfin mobile apps are decent enough for streaming, there's no offline playback support. That's where Symfonium comes into play. This is the greatest Jellyfin app for playing music on Android, and it supports everything I need from a music app and then some. A gorgeous UI, reliable playback for when you are using the internet, and a small enough footprint with full Android Auto support.

Jellyfin is the perfect backend

The best open-source media streaming service

I love Jellyfin. It's the centerpiece of our entertainment, loading up music, shows, and movies wherever we may be. Ripping DVDs and Blu-rays for high-quality content, and having everything cataloged and ready to stream is awesome. The best part? It's all local. I have complete control over how the content is managed, streamed, and everything else. There's no online cloud subscription required, saving us in the long run and ensuring content is always available.

Having moved from Plex to Jellyfin, I've grown to appreciate a more lightweight approach to handling media streaming. Offline playback is now more important than ever when we're constantly on the move inside fast-moving vehicles. Getting it right with Android Auto is vital to ensure you have a distraction-free journey. There's nothing worse than music not streaming smoothly while driving or something else happening on the phone that commands attention.

If you have an expansive collection of music, as I do from hoarding way too many albums, you'll have hours of entertainment just waiting to be streamed to all your devices. But simply firing up the official app and calling it a day is no good for vehicles since there's no offline support, nor does Android Auto work well with the app. So it was off with me to the Google Play Store to see if there was a third-party app available that could connect to my server back at home.

Symfonium is the king of Android Auto music

I'm always listening on the go

I don't find there to be a need to stream movies or shows while I'm on the go. It's always music. Sure, there are times when I'd open up a Jellyfin stream for some visual content when lounging somewhere, but that's where internet connectivity should be at least more reliable than inside a vehicle. For driving, it's always music, and that's precisely what makes Symfonium so good. It's designed from the ground up to handle expansive music collections all stored on Jellyfin.

Symfonium is actually something that made me ditch my old iPhone 12 and the iOS app Manet, which would often stop playing altogether if the signal dropped for a moment. Symfonium waits and reconnects without human intervention. I try to have as many playlists as possible saved locally, but sometimes I need to resort to streaming, and Manet just continued to have issues while Symfonium appears to be much more robust.

Then there's multi-source support, so you can have Jellyfin and Plex albums displayed side by side, with curated Navidrome playlists ready to go. It's the one thing I'd like to see changed with Jellyfin: better official apps, but to be fair, the platform is developed for free, and there are viable third-party alternatives that not only do the job as well as required, but also allow us to support other developers too. As a side note, if you use free and open-source software and there's a donation method, consider doing so.

It's just a brilliant music player

One of the highlights for me with Symfonium is its offline support, whether it's smart caching when streaming or making sound waves with downloaded tracks. It's great for longer journeys where the signal may be sketchy at best or even long-haul flights when Wi-Fi is extortionately expensive and sometimes unreliable at 35,000 feet in the air. There's high-res format support, gapless playback, managing play queues, and even the ability to hook the phone up to Chromecast.

But it keeps out of the way, which is precisely what I need from a music player, especially one that runs through Android Auto. It should be the goal for anyone looking to kit their phone out with apps for the journeys ahead. You'll want to have as few distractions as possible, and having solid apps such as Symfonium at the ready is precisely what's required. Gone are the days when I'd have to stop and spend a couple of minutes trying to try and work out why something isn't working.