In one of the past blogs I have talked about the DFPlayer MINI which I use for my audio outputs.
But the DFPlayer mini has been released in 2014 and there is a newer and enchanced version, or so they claim, called DFPlayer PRO.
The DFPlayer PRO's official wiki can be found here: https://wiki.dfrobot.com/DFPlayer_PRO_SKU_DFR0768
Introduction: Here comes the DFPlayer Pro-a mini simple but powerful MP3 Player! This MP3 player module supports four controlling modes: Arduino, AT command, on-board buttons, and ADKEY. You can directly press the on-board button to play or switch music without using a controller. By using a USB cable, you can easily copy your favorite songs into this module to play them any where you want, or use it as a sound card for your PC or Raspberry Pi after connecting them together.
Compared with the previous DFPlayer Mini, the DFPlayer Pro has 128MB storage that can be directly used without a TF card, and the on-board Type-C socket makes it much convenient to use. And it offers dual channel output, better sound effects. Besides that, DFPlayer Pro is equipped with new functions like fast-forward, fast-rewind, play the audio from a particular point of the audio file, etc
By analysing the features, it seems that the DFPlayer Pro is a better device, however, that is not 100% the case, here are the PROs and CONs:
PROs:
It is thinner.
It does not require a MicroSD Card, also the SD card cannot be broken by accident.
It allows stereo output with the onboard amplifier.
It has a more robust library that allows to check if the file has stopped playing, at what exact time it is with features as fast-forward, fast-rewind.
CONs:
It is about 20% bigger in volume. Larger and wider.
It is limited in only 128mb of storage
Does not allow custom folders, the files are numbered in the order that they have been transfered to the on-board memory.
The amplifier consumes more power.
Here the difference is size can be seen:
The PROs are great, and the DFPlayer PRO device would be a great audio file player, however, it is heavily limited when compared to the original for my use case, where I want different folders containing the outputs for different commands, which heavily simplifies it's implementation. Furthermore, the MINI is smaller, while also having the ability of being made thinner by removing the SD Card connector and connecting the SD card directly.
After comparing them, I can conclude that I will be staying with the DFPlayer Mini.