Is Pi music player good?
Pi Music Player is an Android music player app developed by the Pi Team in 2016. It aims to provide a polished and intuitive music listening experience for Android users. Some of Pi Music Player’s key features include a simple and clean user interface, robust music library management, high-quality audio playback, customizable playlists and radio stations, and additional tools like ringtone creation.
With so many music player apps available for Android, it can be difficult to determine which one is the best fit for your needs. In this review, we will evaluate the Pi Music Player app based on factors like design, functionality, audio quality, and value. Our goal is to provide an objective assessment of whether Pi Music Player lives up to its promise of being a top music app for Android.
Interface and Design
The Pi Music Player interface features a minimalist material design with smooth animations and an intuitive layout (Pi Music Player | 100Pi Labs). The main screen has five tabs at the bottom for Library, Folders, Songs, Albums, and Artists, making it easy to browse your music library. Swiping between tabs triggers fluid animations that contribute to the polished look and feel.
The Now Playing screen can be accessed by tapping on any song and provides playback controls as well as lyrics, album art, and queue management. The interface uses bold colors, typography, and empty space effectively in keeping with material design principles. Overall, navigation feels natural with the tab-based structure and transitions between screens.
Pi Music Player offers multiple themes to choose from as well as an advanced UI customizer to tweak colors, transparency, animations and more. Users can tailor the look substantially without coding knowledge. There are also options to customize the home screen by selecting default start tabs, auto-play behavior, widget layouts and more (1. Getting Started – Pi Music Player). The extensive configuration capabilities allow personalizing the player to individual preferences.
Music Library Management
Pi Music Player makes it easy to add music to your library. Simply connect your Android device to your computer via USB and transfer audio files into the Music folder. Alternatively, you can download music directly to your device and Pi will automatically scan and add the files to its library (1. Getting Started – Pi Music Player).
Organizing a large music collection is seamless with Pi. You can sort by albums, artists, genres, folders, playlists, and more. Pi can handle libraries with tens of thousands of songs without performance issues. The app provides advanced filtering so you can find tracks easily even with a massive collection. You can also search across your entire library to instantly locate artists, albums, or songs (5.0 Settings – Pi Music Player – 1).
Managing playlists is straightforward as well. Pi allows you to create and customize as many playlists as you want. You can easily add tracks from your library to playlists individually or in bulk. Reordering and deleting tracks is seamless. Pi also has smart playlists that automatically populate based on rules you define. Overall, Pi provides a robust set of tools for organizing even the largest personal music libraries.
Playback and Audio Quality
Pi Music Player supports a wide range of audio formats including MP3, FLAC, WAV, OGG, M4A, and AAC (Pi Music Player Reviews – 2024). This allows you to play both lossy and lossless audio files with no issues.
The audio quality on Pi Music Player is excellent. You can customize the audio settings to your preference by adjusting the 10-band equalizer and audio effects. There are preset equalizer settings like Normal, Classical, Dance, Flat, Folk, Heavy Metal, Hip Hop, Jazz, Pop, and Rock that you can choose from (A Stable Local Music Player? : r/androidapps).
Pi Music Player also supports gapless playback so there are no gaps or pauses between tracks during playback. This results in a seamless listening experience as you go through albums or playlists (Pi Music Player – Offline MP3 – Apps on Google Play).
Playlists and Radio
Pi Music Player offers robust playlist management and creation. Users can easily create custom playlists to organize their music library. To create a new playlist, simply tap the + icon at the bottom of the playlist screen and name your playlist.
Songs can be added to playlists by selecting them from the library view and tapping “Add to playlist”. Songs can also be rearranged or removed within a playlist. Playlists in Pi Music Player support up to 1000 songs each (Source).
In addition to manual playlists, Pi Music Player includes smart playlists that are automatically generated based on metadata. There are preset smart playlists like “Most Played” and “Recently Added” that surface popular songs. Users can also create custom smart playlists based on parameters like genre, date added, rating, etc (Source).
For effortless music discovery, Pi Music Player has a built-in radio feature. The radio generates an endless stream of songs based on the user’s preferences and listening history. It can be customized by selecting an artist, album or song to base the radio station on. The radio provides a great way to find new music similar to what you already enjoy.
Additional Features
Pi Music Player comes with a few handy extra features beyond just playing your music library.
One useful feature is the ability to display song lyrics in real-time as the music plays. This allows you to easily sing or read along without having to look up lyrics elsewhere. Lyrics are automatically downloaded and matched with songs when available.
Pi Music Player also integrates with Last.fm to provide stats on your listening habits and suggest music you may like based on your taste profile. Connecting your Last.fm account enables these recommendations and scrobbling of your playback data.
Some other handy extras include a sleep timer that will automatically stop playback after a set duration, gapless playback when transitioning between songs in an album or playlist, bass boost and reverb effects, and the ability to easily set songs as ringtones or alarm tones.
Overall, Pi Music Player aims to provide a complete music listening experience within a single app, reducing the need to jump between multiple apps to lookup lyrics, get recommendations, or customize ringtones.
Customization
One of Pi Music Player’s standout features is its extensive theming and customization options1. The app comes with several built-in dark and light themes to choose from. It also allows you to fully customize colors, typography, icons, blur, and other aesthetic elements.
Beyond basic theming, Pi Music Player has robust support for third-party extensions and plugins2. Developers can build plugins that add new features and functionality. There are plugins for lyrics support, equalizers, audio visualizers, and more. The open plugin architecture makes the app highly extensible.
In the settings menu, you’ll find dozens of customizable options to tweak3. You can configure playback behavior, library management, appearance, gestures, and much more. Expert users will appreciate the ability to fine-tune Pi Music Player to their exact preferences.
Performance
Pi Music Player is designed to be lightweight and efficient in its system resource usage. According to reviews on the Google Play Store, the app has very minimal impact on battery life and RAM usage compared to other music players. Users mention the app running smoothly even on low-end devices with less RAM 1.
In terms of stability, Pi Music Player seems to have relatively few bugs for most users. Reviews praise the overall reliability and crashing rarely being an issue. However, some users have reported lagging or freezing at times when accessing large libraries or during playlist creation 2. Recent updates appear to have addressed many of the stability issues.
Mobile App
Pi Music Player offers a full-featured mobile companion app available for both Android and iOS devices. The app allows you to remotely control music playback on your desktop using your phone or tablet[1]. Through the app, you can browse and search your entire music library, queue up songs, and control playback functions like play, pause, skip, shuffle, and repeat[2].
Some key features of the mobile app include[3]:
- Full library browsing and search
- Playback controls like play, pause, skip track
- Queue management
- Playback modes like shuffle and repeat
- Volume adjustment
- Light and dark themes
The app integrates seamlessly into the Pi Music Player ecosystem, connecting directly to the desktop app over local WiFi. Setup is quick and easy with no configuration required. The mobile and desktop apps stay in sync, so you can start playback on one device and pick up where you left off on the other.
Summary
In summary, Pi Music Player provides a streamlined yet powerful music management and listening experience. Its minimalist interface and intuitive controls make it easy for casual listeners to quickly access their music library. Power users will appreciate advanced features like folder management, playlists, equalizer presets, and Last.fm integration.
The key strengths of Pi are its clean UI, customizable themes, efficient library management, high-quality audio engine, and mobile app syncing. Areas for improvement include adding support for more audio formats, providing smart playlist creation, and reducing minor software bugs.
Pi Music Player is ideal for listeners who want a fuss-free, lightweight music player for local files. It’s especially useful for those with large local libraries who want robust tools for organizing music. The seamless mobile app experience also makes it a great pick for anyone who frequently listens across devices.
Overall, Pi Music Player delivers a polished, minimalist music management app for Windows and Android. While not as feature-packed as some alternatives, it provides an intuitive interface, robust library tools, and high-quality playback for local music collections.