Serento: The audiophile UPnP controller app for iOS/macOS

[serento]

Thanks for taking the time to try it and to write this up in detail.

Let me take your points in order, because they fall into two quite different categories.

Genre tags. Worth separating two things here, because I think you've hit one of them and not the other.

Your genre tag is read and used. On an album, what you see is what your file says, exactly as you tagged it. Nothing is substituted there.

What you've run into is Browse - Genres specifically. That view maps tags into a taxonomy so that libraries with wildly inconsistent tagging still produce something navigable. If you've tagged with precision, seeing your work flattened into a handful of broad buckets is, maybe, a poor result, and that's a fair hit. Whether the answer is a more granular taxonomy or a way to browse raw tags as they appear in your files, I haven't settled yet, but the current state isn't good enough for libraries like yours.

Artist to album list. Fair point, and easy enough to look at. The extra tap exists because the artist view carries more than just albums, but I take the point that for a lot of people the album list is the only thing they came for. I'll think of a solution.

Per track cover art on compilations. That's a genuine limitation rather than a design choice. The now playing screen currently follows the album, not the track. For a compilation where each track carries its own artwork, that's clearly wrong. I'll look into it.

Artist information and network access. This one I'll be straight with you about.

The metadata enrichment is deliberate and it's central to what Serento is. It stays.

The reason is simply what most libraries look like. Yours is carefully organised, and libraries like yours are the exception. The overwhelming majority of people have libraries with patchy genres, missing artwork, inconsistent artist names and no credits at all. For them, browsing raw server output is a poor experience, and the enrichment is what makes the app usable rather than decorative.

What I can tell you is what it does not do. It never modifies your files. Nothing is written back to your library, ever. Everything fetched is cached locally and layered on top of what your files already say, so your own tagging remains the source of truth in the app.

But you're right that the app talks to the internet during sync, and that isn't going to change. If that alone rules it out for you, I understand completely, and I'd rather you knew now than found out three weeks in.

On the wider point. I don't think you're wrong about the philosophy. There's a real difference between a control point that shows you exactly what your server returns and one that builds a layer on top. Serento is the second kind, by intent. Some people want the first, and there are good apps that do that well.

So it may simply not be the right tool for how you work, and that's a perfectly reasonable conclusion to reach. No hard feelings at all.

That said, the genre browsing and the compilation artwork are worth fixing regardless of whether you stay, so thank you for finding them.