While music players for Android smartphones are aplenty, when it comes to music players optimized for Honeycomb the selection is still rather slim. Enter, Hive Player — a Honeycomb optimized music player that offers a few things the stock music player lacks.

Features:

• Scrollable widget with music collection navigation (Albums, Artists, All Songs, Playlists, Genres), shuffle, pause/play next and previous.
• Widget and Player sync with each other – view an album in the widget, then in the player the same album is loaded. Every navigation and song play is synced to each other – even when only the widget or player is running, load the other and it will sync on startup.
• Play and navigate music library using just the widget – player doesn’t even need to be loaded or running.
• Navigate back through navigation steps using back button on player or widget – uses the standard Android back button on Honeycomb.
• Albums, Artists, All Songs, Playlists, Genres are displayed on the left and player controls on the right.
• Multi-Select playlist additions – build a playlist as it should be done, not one song at a time – add multiple albums, artists, genres, songs and even current playlists to a playlist.
• Duplicates are filtered out when adding to playlists.
• Search with playlist additions – search and keep searching as you build the ultimate playlist. Search appears over player.

Hive Player comes in two versions, giving users plenty of choice. The lite version is available for free with some restrictions on the widgets, playlists and display options while the paid version with the full features costs only $2. One thing to note though is that if most of your music is stored with Google Music, those files won’t show up within the app. Google is not allowing or releasing details to developers to put Music Beta functionality into their music players.

We’ll have a full review up soon but in the meantime, you’ll find the download link past the break. Give it a shot, and leave some comments. The developer, Nicholas is looking for some feedback on how to improve the app.

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