Hi everyone,
1.1.0 is up for review, and it is a big one. A lot of it came straight from your reports, and a lot from my own library, which turns out to be a good stress test: trance compilations with credits written every possible way, classical box sets, and tens of thousand of tracks. Here is everything that changed, and why.
TRACK ARTISTS
Until now, Browse › Artists only listed the artists credited on albums. If someone appeared on a single track of a compilation, or as the featured artist on somebody else’s song, they had no place of their own. In 1.1.0 you can turn on Detect track artists in Settings › Artist Settings › Track Artist Options, and Serento reads the artist of every track. Those artists then show up in Browse › Artists and in the genres they play in, after the genre’s own artists.
An artist’s page now has two shelves: Albums, with their own records, and Appears On, with the albums where they only appear on some of the tracks.
Track artists can easily outnumber album artists, especially if you have a lot of compilations. If the list gets too long, Hide track artists keeps them out of Browse › Artists while leaving them everywhere else in the app. It also hides artists whose only album comes from a compilation, so someone with one track on a various-artists album stays out of the list. Detect track artists is off by default, so nothing changes until you ask for it.
BETTER ARTIST RECOGNITION
A lot of work went into deciding who an artist actually is.
Credits glued together without a separator are split into the real artists. Some releases credit their tracks as “Armin van Buuren Susana” or “Armin van Buuren Brennan Heart Andreas Moe”, and each of those used to become an artist of its own. When a track on an artist’s own album starts with that artist’s name and continues with other names, Serento now splits the credit, but only when every part can be confirmed, so names like Manhattan Transfer or Martin Gore are never cut in half.
Composite names are split when your library proves it: if both halves of “A & B” already exist in your library as artists of their own, the row becomes two artists. Real duos stay together: acts the music catalog knows as one, like Darius & Finlay, Kiyoi & Eky, Sunnery James & Ryan Marciano or Au/Ra, are kept as one artist.
Two spellings of the same artist are now one artist, for example Solar Stone and Solarstone, or The Bill Evans Trio and Bill Evans Trio.
Classical roles are more honest. Serento used to label any person it knew nothing else about as a conductor, which is how pianists like Nils Frahm ended up in the Conductors list. Now a person without a known classical role is simply an artist. Soloist and conductor roles come from the credits in the Serento Database, and someone with real credits of both kinds appears in both lists. Artist Settings also has a new option, Show soloists in Browse Artists, if you want soloists in the main Artists list as well.
ARTIST PHOTOS
More artists get a photo. When several artists share a name, Serento now looks at the tracks you own to decide which one is yours, instead of guessing and showing a stranger’s face, or giving up. No artist is skipped any more when the photo service is slow to answer: Serento waits and asks again.
If you keep artist pictures in MinimServer’s indexArtwork folder, names with characters that are not allowed in file names now work. MinimServer’s rule is to replace such a character with a space or leave it out, so the picture for an album artist like D:Ream can be saved as “D Ream”, and Serento finds it.
CLASSICAL ALBUMS
Classical albums now follow their works exactly the way the Works lists do. The work headers on an album are the works Serento identified for it, with the same tracks and the same names you see under Works, on the work’s own page and on the composer’s page.
A thin line runs from each work header down to its last movement, so you can see where one work ends and the next begins. A work with a single track is shown as a normal track, which matters for neo-classical and crossover albums, where every track used to get a work header of its own.
Multi-disc classical albums show their CDs like any other multi-disc album, with the works of each disc underneath, and the discs collapse and expand the same way. Each disc numbers its tracks from 1, even when the server numbers the whole set continuously, and a disc’s subtitle is shown when it has one. Playing a work header plays that work from its own disc.
In the Works tab, the groups (Symphony, Concerto, Sonata and so on) now collapse and expand like CDs.
GENRES
The genre map is much richer. Every standard genre name written by the common tagging tools now finds its main genre, so an album no longer disappears from the Genres tab because of an unusual but perfectly valid tag. Neo Classical and Neo-Classical are recognized under Classical.
There are four new main genres: Experimental, New Age, Religious and Vocal. Albums with no genre tag at all, or with a tag that does not name any genre, now appear under Unclassified instead of nowhere. A tag that just says Traditional, in any language, goes to World › Traditional.
Every genre and every subgenre has a new Decades section that splits its albums by decade, both in the standard genres and in Custom Genres.
Genre pictures are now always photos of artists, never album covers. Each genre gets a different artist, chosen among the artists who matter most in that genre, so the same face no longer shows up on several tiles.
A genre’s artist list has a scroll bar and the A-Z bar now, and with Detect track artists on, it also includes the track artists who play in that genre.
DISPLAY SETTINGS
You can now personalise much more of how Serento looks, from Settings › Display:
Album Settings: the metadata shown next to the format badge on every album (year, rating) andAlbum Version Grouping.- A
rtist Settings: artist images from your server, the track artist options and the soloists option, each on its own screen with its own explanation. Track Settings, on iPad and Mac: choose, for each list, whether the track rows show theformat column. There is one switch per list (Albums,Folder albums,Artists,Tracks,Playlists,Tags,Listen Later,History,Search,DownloadsandStatistics) and anAll listsswitch at the top that turns them all on or off at once. When the column is hidden, the title and the artist get the space. Where the format sits on its own line under the artist, like on Home’s Recently Played, it is part of the row’s details and stays.Genre Settings: Custom Genres and its options.
Switches in Settings also respond instantly now. Before, the first switch you moved after opening the app could freeze everything for two or three seconds while the setting was being saved. Saving happens in the background now.
In Sync Data, Enrich Data is a regular switch.
SYNC
Large libraries get through a sync much faster after the scan. Checking every track for a cover of its own could take close to an hour on a very big library and made the sync look stuck on Scanning. It now takes about as long as reading the track list once.
Every step after the scan now shows its name and its progress: Checking track covers, Finding folder covers, Updating track covers, then Building library index with a real counter, followed by Updating artists. You always know what the sync is doing.
Syncing several large libraries one after the other works properly again.
The screen stays on while a sync is running, so a long sync is not interrupted when the device would otherwise go to sleep.
Classical opens noticeably faster on large libraries.
SERVERS
Serento now also listens for servers that announce themselves on the network. A server that is running and reachable, but does not answer Serento’s search, for example on a machine that runs two UPnP servers or behind an access point that filters multicast, now shows up in the list on its own.
EVERYTHING ELSE
- Bookmarks: in the compact list, swipe a bookmark to the left to delete it. The ⋯ menu is still there too.
- iPad and Mac: the Volume and Audio Output panels now share one design, with the same size and header, so switching between them no longer moves anything. On Mac, the settings of an output open inside the panel, like on iPad, instead of in a separate window.
- iPad: the buttons in Now Playing are glass.
- iPhone and iPad: every screen that was missing a scroll bar has one now, including Statistics, Tags and a tag’s lists, Similar Artists, Similar Albums, album details, Smart Mixes, Listen Later, Bookmarks, Folders and playlists.
- Album versions are recognised as the same album even when their artists are listed in a different order or with a different separator.
- After you correct an album with Identify, or use Restore Original Metadata, the track titles update right away instead of after reopening the album.
- A folder album shows the right tracks when two servers expose the same folder.
- On Mac, a scheduled sync that was missed because the app was closed no longer starts when you open the app later. That night is simply skipped, as the Schedule sync screen says.
- On Mac, the Artists list no longer jumps back to the top.
- On iPad, the + button no longer covers the last item of a list.
Plus the usual round of bug fixes.
As always, thank you for the reports and for your patience. If something looks off after updating, post it in the support category.
Don’t forget to turn on the new settings and run a sync with the server for the new changes to be visible.
Lorin.