Serento: The audiophile UPnP controller app for iOS/macOS

[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.