It's good to see that the quest for best quality digital audio on the go goes on!
Downloaded and installed your player. A very good project, that has all the chances to eventually turn into a strong contender in the market of custom Android digital audio output.
It certainly still has a few quirks here and there, but I am sure will quickly evolve into a more mature product.
Certainly, the promissed DLNA support is extremely attractive (in fact, this is currently one of the two things I miss in UAPP - together with .cue sheet support.)
I tested it on
Xperia Z1 Compact running the latest 4.4.4 stock firmware, and
M2Tech HiFace DAC.
Here are a few impressions so far.
1) The biggest issue that I see today is the stability and buffer management. Sometimes, any file would play back in highly distorted and jerky way. After reconnecting the DAC, things may come back to normal. Then, the distorted sound would eventually come back. Looks like the buffering issue, or something. This is a very tricky area, where you'll need to spend a lot of time polishing... As it
never happens with UAPP, it means it is your player problem, not the phone or the DAC problem.
2) Scanning and processing music in my case was pretty quick (I have a moderate library on the SD card, around 1.3K files in about 150 folders), however, cyrillic tags do not show up properly. File and folder names are OK, tags are all squares. Maybe, bad tag font encoding - will have to do more research.
3) .cue files are supported - YEAH!!!... This is the feature I think UAPP is missing badly, and it was the main reason I decided to try Hiby, so I will pay a lot of attention to the way it is implemented. And the way it is now - is a little strange.
First, when you open a folder with, say, a .flac and a .cue, there's no easy way to tell which is which, because in the majority of cases they're named the same, only the extension differs. So different icons for different file types would be very helpful. Otherwise you can only
guess the actual file type by its behaviour and available options, and I'll talk about it later.
Second, I did not find the way to see the track list of a cue file currently played. I.e. you can see the album and artist name, which is cool, but you can only see the track name of the track that is currently playing. This is pretty unfortunate, as the convenient track list within the single-file album is the main purpose of .cue sheets.
Third, cue sheet and the actual file will give you the same result when tapped on from the "Folder" view of the browser. This is fine, but... sort of unintuitive - again, you cannot tell what you launched - the file, or the cue sheet. The best way it is done is with Foobar2000 for Windows: if you launch a .cue, you get the list of tracks with respective length, if you launch a file, you get one veeeeeeery long track
Fourth, I did no find the way to add a .cue file to the Playlist. When long-tapping on the it in the browser, you just don't get the list of options to add to a playlist.
Fifth, there is something wrong with time remaining display. If I launch a file which is single-file album (a big .flac with cue), the total time shows some weird stuff. It's neither the total track length, nor the first track length, nor the last - just some weired short number, like 1:31.
Having said this, let me re-iterate once again: you're doing a great job trying to offer a nice and fully featured solution for the growing community of "nomad audiophiles" with Android phones! And we really appreciate it! And if we can be of any help testing - just let us know!
Regards,
SV_huMMer
