Serento: The audiophile UPnP controller app for iOS/macOS

[Donuk]

Thank you for all your feedback, Serento, and for acknowledging some of the shortcomings we have pointed out.

Perhaps you have launched your product a little too early. Especially with the pricing you are requiring.

Put it this way - Serento may or may not prove better than Lumin for me. But I will never know. My free subscription expires in about a week now, and I am unlikely to pay for a product which I will not have seen, when you address some of the issues.

I respect anyone who is trying to get something off the ground in these difficult times, but perhaps you should reconsider the pricing. Perhaps make it free and time limited until it is all OK.

Best wishes, Donuk

[Donuk]

..... and, Serento, maybe publish a free version that does not connect at all to the internet.....
Donuk

[serento]

Thank you, Donuk.

On launching too early, I'd push back gently.

Every product launches with a list of things people want that aren't there yet. Mine included. But that list has no end. If I waited until nobody could name a missing feature, Serento would still be unreleased in five years, and I'd have built it entirely on my own assumptions instead of on what people actually ask for once they have it in their hands.

What matters is whether the foundation is sound. I think it is. Discovery, playback, gapless, native DSD up to DSD512, on device DSD decoding, OpenHome queue and radio handling, multi device sync of queue and state, the classical section, downloads, tags, bookmarks, ratings. None of that is thin. It is a mature product for a first release, and the things you've raised are refinements on top of a working base rather than holes in it.

The honest answer to "when will it be all OK" is never, for any software. Lumin isn't finished either. Nothing is. What you can reasonably ask is how quickly it moves.

Serento ships an update every two weeks. Not quarterly, not when I get around to it. I don't know of another app in this category moving at that rate. Every one of those releases is driven by what people post in this forum and write to me directly. That's the actual proposition: not a finished object, but a product that changes fast in the direction its users push it.

On the pricing, I understand the hesitation, but free would guarantee the opposite of what you're asking for. There's one person building this. The reason I can ship every two weeks is that it's the work, not a hobby squeezed around something else. Free software from a single developer either stalls within a year or gets abandoned, and I'd rather not do that to the people who trusted it.

There is also an annual option alongside the lifetime one, precisely so nobody has to make a large bet on an app they've known for two weeks. And you can move from annual to lifetime later if it earns it.

If Serento turns out not to be the right fit for how you work, that's genuinely fine. There are good apps in this space and I'd rather you use the one that suits you than pay for one that doesn't.

Either way, thanks for the specific criticism. It's more useful than most of what I get.

[Stake]

(28-08-2026 10:23)Donuk Wrote:  I respect anyone who is trying to get something off the ground in these difficult times, but perhaps you should reconsider the pricing. Perhaps make it free and time limited until it is all OK.

Best wishes, Donuk

Considering its capabilities and once it will have streaming services integrated Serento could be a real Roon killer at less than a quater of the price.
So pricing is not really where I see an issue.

[simbun]

(27-08-2026 09:33)Donuk Wrote:  As I understand it, the playlist on one's streamer is simply a list of addresses for the streamer to read from, say, a NAS. But I am willing to be educated....

Some control points have the ability to transcode streams when the target renderer lacks support e.g. playing DSF to Sonos.

Quote:The one principle I refused to compromise on: it stays out of the audio path. Serento finds your server and your renderer, tells them to talk to each other directly, and steps aside.

Quote:No audio processing - zero DSP, zero touch on the signal

Translated, I presume these mean that Serento won't/can't transcode; instead it'll either pass the stream URL to the renderer as-is (which will probably fail silently) or display a compatibility error in the UI. In other words, from a playback perspective it's no different to mconnect, Lumin, Linn e.t.c.
I use BubbleUPnP which does have the ability to transcode, but I have it disabled as I'd prefer MinimStreamer to perform any conversions.

If you're on Windows, TuneBrowser is an excellent tool to view the communication between control point and renderer.

I captured the following events using BubbleUPnP and the Linn app (I'm on Android so can't test Serento but the commands will be the same):

Code:

Action                   Control point command
---------------------------------------------------------------
Enqueued an album      = Insert (per track)
Play the first track   = SeekId
Opened Linn            = ReadList (populated the queue in Linn)
Advanced to next track = Next
Stop playback          = Stop
Cleared the queue      = DeleteAll

Had I not been interacting with the OpenHome queue, playback would have continued uninterrupted with the control point only polling/listening for state changes (track progress/transition) so they could be reflected in the UI.

Here's a screenshot of the OpenHome renderer in TuneBrowser with the UPnP log showing the first Insert call from BubbleUPnP.

   
As you can see, in OpenHome the renderer holds the queue. In standard UPnP-AV only the current and next track are known to the renderer with the control point holding the remainder.

All of this is to say that if the control point isn't doing any transcoding, the renderer pulls the audio track straight from the server, meaning the control point can't affect the sound quality in any way.

There looks to be a lot of other features to like, but sound quality isn't one of them.

[lyapounov]

First congrat to enter this already crowded space. As for me, I never found better than Lumin (IOS)

But I am always happy to test new apps (FYI I am a geek)...

I therefore dpwnloaded and installed Serento on my iPad. That was easy and fast !

Then next:...

1) No server found on my network (all other apps find my minimserver without difficulty on this iPad)

2) Playing on... This iPad. It doesn't find my Linn renderer (all other apps find it without difficulty on this iPad)

And then... after 10 minutes, suddenly Serento tells me to go to the app settings to allow network scan (can't you do this by default ???) which the app did not tell me when I opened it. So basically the app wants you to be furious for 10 minutes before telling you what to do.

Then it took me another 5 minutes to find how to browse my library. I always browse by folder. And then this beautiful message:

Couldn't load this folder
This server doesn't expose a folder browser

Well of course it does. Lumin has no issue with this

Then I clicked on genre. Answer : "network error"

As I am a geek, I think I understood: I have over 10800 albums; and serento is probably downloading them. Funny, when Lumin does this, it displays a pop-up saying "downloading library"

In a nutshell : User Experience is disastrous.

Tell us when it will be improved. And I hope it will be before next two weeks; because I won't pay $50 for this app with this UX !

[serento]

Thank you for the kind words about the launch, and thank you for taking the time to actually install Serento and write all of this down. Detailed feedback from someone who knows the space is worth a lot, so let me go through your points one by one.

On the network prompt: that dialog is presented by iOS itself, not by the app. Serento starts scanning the network in the first second after it is opened, which is exactly the moment that is supposed to trigger the system prompt, so it should have appeared right at launch rather than ten minutes later. iOS does not allow an app to grant itself local network access, and it does not allow an app to raise that prompt on demand either. When the prompt does not appear at the moment the scan starts, it is a glitch in the operating system's permission flow, and that part is genuinely outside my control. The later message pointing you to Settings is the app's own fallback for precisely this situation, which is why you eventually saw it. I am sorry it cost you those ten minutes.

On folder browsing: it does work, and it works well. It needs one configuration step first. You tick your server in the "Playing from" section in Settings, and folder browsing becomes available for that server. Separately, and independently of Serento, the Lumin firmware restricts access to certain functions from outside their own app. That behaviour is documented on their side, and it is one of the reasons a third party app can look less capable than Lumin's own with a Lumin renderer.

I also want to be straightforward with you about the direction of the app, because it decides whether Serento is the right tool for you. Serento is not built for people whose primary way of listening is browsing folders. If folder browsing is the experience you want, mConnect or Lumin does that job well and there is nothing wrong with staying there. What I am building is meant to be better than navigating a folder tree, not a nicer wrapper around one.

Concretely, with a library your size, the path I would suggest is to let Serento sync the library once, and then convert your folder organisation into hierarchical tags using the tagging function built into the app. That gives you the same structure you already rely on, plus filtering, cross cutting views and search over it, instead of one fixed path per album.

You can see the full feature set here: https://serento.app/Home/Features

I am not going to make promises about a two week window, but the points you raised are noted and the app is under active development. If you decide to give it another try, I would genuinely like to hear how it goes after the library sync.

If you message me in private I can help you with extending the free trial so you can test it longer.

[Peter StreamMagic]

For some reason Serento does not recognise my genre tags.
I have rescanned several times but still no luck “ no genres yet”.

Serento clearly does not respect MinimServer index artwork, it shows its own database and some “good “ artwork has been replaced by none or worse looking pictures.
Is there a way to change this behaviour?

[serento]

Hi Peter. Thanks for trying out Serento.

Regarding genres, I assume you are running into the same issue as Stake. I will reiterate what is going on.

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 are running into, most probably, is Browse - Genres specifically. That view maps tags into a taxonomy so that libraries with wildly inconsistent tagging still produce something navigable. If you have tagged with precision, seeing your work flattened into a handful of broad buckets is, maybe, a poor result, and that is a fair point. I can work on that in a future version so that the taxonomy is not used (an on-off toggle) and your own genres are displayed, but without a hierarchy of genres the experience is going to be poor.

Serento reads and respects the albumArtURI that MinimServer announces. It is the starting point for every album and every track, and it remains the final answer wherever nothing better exists.

On top of it, Serento applies one deliberate preference. When the album folder contains its own cover image file, that file wins. The reason is quality: the indexed artwork is the thumbnail embedded in the audio tags (typically around 500 pixels), while the folder file is your full-resolution master (often 1000 pixels or larger). On a large display the difference is immediately visible.

A second deliberate correction, coming in the next version, is for compilations. The album artwork goes through the same flow: the announced artwork first, and the folder image file when one exists. Per-track artwork announced by the server is always honoured, exactly as sent. This part is new and was implemented based on the feedback received here.

On very large libraries (5000 albums or more) Serento follows the MinimServer artwork index verbatim: each album shows exactly the artwork the server announces, fetched on demand.

[serento]

What I have been working on this week (Aug 24 - Aug 31)

The next update has been in the works for a full week now, and it grew into one of the bigger ones so far. Here is what it brings, roughly in the order I worked on it.

iOS 27 and macOS 27 readiness

It started as compatibility work for this fall’s OS releases, and Serento now runs cleanly on both. Along the way I fixed several visual issues that only showed up on the new OS: the virtualised lists on memory-constrained devices had a hard top and bottom background instead of the soft one the rest of the UI uses, and several sheets were missing their soft toolbar. Both match the rest of the app now.

Audio quality fixes

This is the part I am happiest about. Pressing Next or Play on a DSD file on certain streamers could produce a brief burst of audio noise, and the same could happen on anything above CD quality. That noise is gone. I also fixed PCM stuttering when pressing next, previous or seeking. If you listen to hi-res or DSD on problematic streamers, this update should feel noticeably more solid.

Multi-select

You can now long-press to enter selection mode in lists and grids, select multiple albums, tracks or artists, and act on all of them at once: play, queue, tag, favorite, rate, download. Check All is there for large selections. This works across Browse, Tags, Bookmarks and the Classical section.

Reordering

Playlists and bookmarks can now be reordered by dragging, using the native iOS 27 list editing behaviours.

Cover art on compilations

Compilation albums now show the right artwork everywhere. Each track that carries its own embedded art keeps it, in Now Playing, on the lock screen, everywhere, while the album itself shows its proper cover. On top of that, the whole cover pipeline moved inside the sync: covers are downloaded and verified while the sync runs, with their own visible stages on the sync screen, so when the sync says done, it is actually done. A nice side effect: if you replace a cover file on your server with a new image under the same name, Serento now detects the change at the next sync and updates it on every surface. Previously that change was invisible.

Sync behaviour

Two quality-of-life changes here. If a scheduled overnight sync was interrupted and Serento finishes it when you open the sync screen, it now says so, so an automatically started sync is never a mystery. And Cancel now means cancel: it discards the interrupted sync entirely, so Sync Again starts a fresh sync from zero. That matters when you add an album in the morning and want it in your library right away.

Plex and folder browsing

Fixed several Plex sync issues, fixed folder view when multiple servers are active, and fixed the breadcrumb scroll position when navigating deep folder trees.

Volume

Plus and minus volume buttons are now added on the volume popover with 1% increments, where the output allows it, along with a maximum volume setting. This is important so you don’t accidentally set a dangerous volume level.

Polish

An updated app icon, haptic feedback across all the important interactions, a fixed alphabetical index bar layout, horizontal scroll bars removed everywhere, plus fixes for classical music bookmarks, a search issue, the format badge showing bit-perfect while nothing was playing, and tapping the mini player while Now Playing was already open.

Expected release date

The update is expected to land after September the 8th or 9th. It depends when Apple releases the release candidate of iOS 27.