Volumio vs MOode vs piCorePlayer – In depth Comparison

The way of use:

Now this is one of the most important things which will differentiate and also unite these players quite a bit. Depends what you are interested in. In my example I have a personal collection of my music, which are digital FLAC files and then I also use Tidal as my streaming service every day, your scenario might differ but lets say everybody nowadays uses his favorite online streaming service and I believe most of us also have some small or bigger collection of digital files.

So all of these players are capable to play hi-res audio files including DSD files, all players allow you to use for your local library external, drive, the actual free space on your SD card a NAS drive on your network. All of them have the same capabilities in that regards.

Now each of these players allow you to use them as UPNP or DLNA renderer/browser. What that means is that from your UPNP client/server which can be running on your computer or as an app on your mobile phone you can play – stream music to these players without them accessing anything else online.

Basically how it works is the UPNP software on your pc or mobile device connects to a source of your choice, which can be again your audio files stored on your pc or mobile device or it can be a streaming service which is supported through your UPNP client app. This UPNP client then collects the data and sends them via your network to Raspberry Pi / your player and it plays it.

The advantages and disadvantages of this way of use of these players are these:

If you use this way of streaming you always need your phone or device you have the UPNP client on in your hands as another main remote control and you will rarely use the the web UI of these players after the first set up.

I personally don’t use UPNP for 2 reasons.

First I find annoying to use another device to control my music player, as the beauty of this raspberry pi solution and of these players is that any device at your home with internet browser can be used as a remote control of your music anytime and is very easy to use I don’t want to use another device as phone with another extra software to all do basic stuff as skip track or change source of my music.

Second, I prefer to have untouched the path between my source and the player, I don’t want a middle point collecting all the metadata and source files sending over to player, I just don’t feel good about it as you don’t know what exactly was sent and if all. Just my opinion.

But if you don’t mind using it this way all of these players work fine as UPNP renderers, but I found there are some bugs and another downside of this way of use.

The UPNP clients – I mean apps differ and some support more streaming services some less, another difference is how the actual data are sent. I found out that for example from Bubble UPNP the cover photos sometimes show sometimes they don’t also the resolution of the picture is low on another UPNP client the cover art worked fine but I could not skip tracks, with Bubble UPNP I can skip track but also the bitrate limit is 16bit 44khz for most streaming services.