Audify vs Lark Player: two free offline players with ads, compared honestly

Short answer: both are free, both show ads, and both play the music already on your phone, so ads do not decide this one. Choose Lark Player if you want music and video in a single app with a floating window you can resize and move over other apps, plus a video-to-MP3 converter. Choose Audify if the music library matters more: lyrics while you play, internet radio, a ringtone cutter, Google Drive backup, Calm sounds with a sleep timer, an AI tag editor, gapless playback, and the same app on Android, iPhone, Windows and Mac. Neither needs an account, and neither downloads or streams music. Facts checked against both Google Play listings in September 2026.

At a glance, September 2026

Ads and price. Both are free with ads. Lark Player's listing carries the Contains ads and In-app purchases labels, with purchases from US$0.99 to US$6.99 per item, and a promotional card on the listing advertises an Equalizer Pro unlock. Audify: free with ads; Premium removes them (monthly or yearly, lifetime on Android only).

Music or video. Lark Player is a music player and a video player in one; its listing names MP4, 3GP, WEBM, MOV and MKV for video and puts a resizable floating window at the centre of the pitch. Audify plays local video too, but it is built around the music library.

Equalizer. Lark Player: a powerful equalizer, in the listing's words, with ten named presets (Normal, Classical, Dance, Flat, Folk, Heavy Metal, Hip-hop, Jazz, Pop, Rock), bass enhancement, reverb and sound-field adjustment; the listing does not say how many bands. Audify: a 10-band equalizer with bass boost, virtualizer and reverb, plus loudness normalization at -14 LUFS and gapless playback.

Lyrics. Both show them. Lark Player's listing says it matches lyrics with the offline songs on your phone. Audify shows lyrics while you play; the lyrics guide explains where they come from.

Library tools. Lark Player: browse by song, artist, album, genre and folder, create playlists, delete files from inside the app, convert a video to MP3, and share a song over Bluetooth or a messaging app. Audify: an AI tag editor, hidden items, Google Drive backup for playlists, and Mixes, where several people add to one playlist.

Beyond the library. Audify adds internet radio with more than 50,000 stations, Calm sounds with a sleep timer, a ringtone cutter, playback speed and an audiobook mode. Lark Player adds a sleep timer, a day/night theme, and setting a local song as your ringtone.

Car and casting. Audify supports Android Auto, CarPlay on iPhone and Chromecast. Lark Player's listing mentions none of the three.

Platforms. Lark Player's listing describes an Android app. Audify runs on Android, iPhone, Windows and Mac.

Scale. Lark Player: 500M+ downloads and 4.6★ on Google Play, and its listing says more than 100 million people use it. Audify: 100M+ downloads and 4.5★ on Google Play.

Lark Player column from its Google Play listing, read September 2026. "Not in the listing" means the listing does not mention it.

Where Lark Player wins: video and the floating window

Lark Player's case is that it is two players in one. Its listing describes a free offline music player and video player, names MP4, 3GP, WEBM, MOV and MKV among the video formats, and makes the floating window the headline: you set its size and position and keep a video or a song going while you do something else on the phone. If your folders mix films, lectures and songs and you want a single app for all of them, that is the argument, and it is a fair one. Audify plays local video too, but it is not trying to be a video app first.

The rest of its free feature list is practical rather than flashy: a converter that turns a video into an MP3, sharing songs over Bluetooth or a messaging app, setting a local track as your ringtone, deleting files and building playlists inside the app, a day/night theme and a sleep timer. It is also very widely used, with 500 million-plus downloads and a 4.6-star rating on Google Play, and the listing itself claims more than 100 million users worldwide. Popularity is not the same as quality, but it does mean a great many phones like yours have already run it.

Where Audify wins: the music library, the car and four platforms

Audify's case is everything around the music. It plays internet radio from a directory of more than 50,000 stations, backs your playlists up to Google Drive, and has Mixes, where several people add to one playlist. It shows lyrics while you play (the lyrics guide explains where they come from), normalizes loudness to -14 LUFS so a quiet album and a loud one sit at the same level, plays gapless so there is no silence between the tracks of a live album, cuts ringtones from the part of a song you choose (Lark Player's listing mentions setting a song as a ringtone, not trimming it), plays Calm sounds for sleep on their own timer, and gives audiobooks their own type with a playback-speed control. An AI tag editor and hidden items keep the library tidy.

The bigger difference is where it runs. Audify is on Android, iPhone, Windows and Mac, so the library you build on the phone plays the same way on a laptop, and the desktop apps add ALAC, APE and WavPack decoding. Lark Player's listing describes an Android app and mentions no other platform. If you own more than one kind of device, this decides it; the Windows and Mac guide covers the desktop side. In the car, Audify supports Android Auto and CarPlay on iPhone, and it casts to Chromecast; none of the three appears in Lark Player's listing.

Ads and price, honestly

Neither app is ad-free, so this is a question of what removing the ads costs and what else you get, not whether they exist. Lark Player's listing carries the Contains ads and In-app purchases labels, with purchases from US$0.99 to US$6.99 per item; a promotional card on the same listing advertises an Equalizer Pro unlock, and the listing does not describe an ad-free plan, so check inside the app before assuming a purchase removes them. Audify's free version shows ads between actions, never over the music, and Premium removes them: it is sold monthly or yearly on both platforms, with a lifetime option on Android.

If you have paid for Audify Premium and still see ads, the purchase belongs to the Google account that bought it, and the phone has to be signed in to that account; the paid-but-still-seeing-ads guide walks through the check. Neither app needs an account to play your files, and neither downloads or streams music: Lark Player's listing says outright that it is not a music downloader, and Audify plays the files you already own.

Formats and files

Both read an ordinary library without conversion. Lark Player's listing names MP3, MIDI, WAV, FLAC, AC3, AAC and M4A among its audio formats, and MP4, 3GP, WEBM, MOV and MKV for video. Audify decodes MP3, WAV, FLAC, AAC, AC3, WMA, M4A, OGG, Opus and AIFF on Android and adds ALAC, APE and WavPack on Windows and Mac. MIDI is on Lark Player's list and not on Audify's; WMA, OGG, Opus and AIFF are on Audify's list and not in Lark Player's, which ends in "etc." Neither listing claims DSD, and Audify does not play it. Android itself decodes FLAC natively since version 3.1 and Opus since 5.0. The full list is in what audio formats Audify supports.

Which one to choose

Choose Lark Player if you want music and video in one app, a floating window that keeps a video or a song going over other apps, a video-to-MP3 converter, and you are fine with ads or its in-app purchases.

Choose Audify if you want lyrics while you play, internet radio, a ringtone cutter, Google Drive backup, Calm sounds with a sleep timer, gapless playback with loudness normalization, Android Auto, CarPlay or Chromecast, and one app across Android, iPhone, Windows and Mac, with ads in the free version or a Premium plan to remove them.

Both, if you like: they read the same folders and neither moves or copies your files. Neither downloads or streams music; both play what you already own. For the wider field, see the best free offline players for Android.

Common questions

Sources

“Currently, more than 100 million users worldwide use Lark Player to play music offline.”Lark Player, Google Play listing

• Lark Player: Music Player & MP3 on Google Play — Google Play
• Supported media formats — Android Developers
• Manage subscriptions on Google Play — Google Play Help

Read next

• Best free offline music player for Android (2026)
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• How to see lyrics while playing music on Android