Serento: The audiophile UPnP controller app for iOS/macOS

[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.