Serento: The audiophile UPnP controller app for iOS/macOS

[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.