HiBy Music App

I know there are a plethora of different music player apps on Android, and most people just stick with the default included by the phone manufacturer, but there's good reason to try a few others. HiBy's own music app, aptly named HiBy Music, is worth a closer look, also as it's my first HiBy DAP review. Open the app and the notification bar indicates as much with an icon that pops up, and pulling down the menu provides playback controls. If you read my accompanying review of the HiBy Lasya IEMs, you would know why I have two Dua Lipa albums in there. I just closed my eyes and chose randomly from my collection of locally stored music files for the microSD card used for testing, and it happened to fall over the MGSV soundtrack, which explains the extremely weird combination here. I was happy to see most of my desktop experience with JRiver translate over to the HiBy Music app, including pre-sorted songs into albums, tracks titled and tags displayed as expected, album art showing up correctly, and the ability to sort tracks based on artist, storage type, genre, or selected favorites among the collection. There's a dedicated button to log into and play Tidal tracks because of MQA, and then there's this weird thing called HiBy Controller for two devices to use the app and act as a server and client. This allows my phone to control the DAP, for example, which it does by Bluetooth pairing the two devices. At this point, most of what's on the DAP will be visible on my phone too, except for the album art in the navigation menu, although it shows up when playing a song. There is minimal lag, but Bluetooth range is limiting in this use case. I suppose I can see it being useful if streaming from another device to the DAP itself, which can be extrapolated to a Windows PC, too.


The main menu is accessed by hitting the profile photo in the top-left corner, which is a blank head if not logged in. Aside from more seamless connections across devices and keeping up with the app's own features, there's not much to gain by creating an account. This is where music is imported via WiFi, which worked flawlessly, non-music files are set not to show up in the playlist, the app is set to only scan specific folders depending on your file storage preferences and system, and a 10-band graphical EQ with presets to choose from and create is available. Combined with MSEB, which is natively integrated here, it allows for plenty of experimentation.


MSEB isn't the only thing integrated into the app, as we see some more available plug-ins, which had me try HiBy Music out on my phone as well, where I typically use Poweramp Music Player with Poweramp EQ. These plug-ins are slightly different from the system-wide ones we saw before, with channel balance the only common one. The other three are more psychoacoustic and experimental in nature, aiming to produce a more holographic experience with a larger sense of space from the music. I'll leave you to try these and see whether they are for you; I was fine either way since it was barely noticeable on the tracks I used for testing. Summaries of what the plug-ins do are once again available, and if needed, a tutorial in the menu walks you through the home page and navigation options.


The other available options and settings are self-explanatory, but still worth mentioning since they add positively to using the HiBy R5 (Gen 2). A configurable sleep timer preserves battery life, and paired with the lock screen settings, the HiBy Music app may solely be used via the buttons to further preserve battery life. This also means playback controls, the track title, and any applicable album art will show up under these settings. Volume control is available via the display too, and I actually used it over the buttons for faster, more visual changes. The buttons are better for finer control, and if you have OCD and care about having specific numbers for volume. The app displays the real-time sample rate at the top next to the battery percentage even if minimized, but more information within the app is available in a classic iPod-style skin that displays the bit depth, file type, and other metadata of the songs. Search for album art and lyrics from within the app too, with the former giving reasonably relevant results while the latter never worked with the files here. There are many more options, including the fixed output sampling rate we saw before, which is better done on a system-wide basis in HIBy OS. Overall, I was left quite impressed by both HiBy OS and HiBy Music, and it's more the age of the hardware and software base that makes it feel like more could have been provided.