Pentaton 1.1 is out!

We’re committed to improving Pentaton’s listening experience. Version 1.1 is now live in the AppStore it has some great improvements that we hope you’ll like.

Faster browsing

Even as mobile devices get faster and faster, we’re waiting for them more and more. One of our goals while building Pentaton is to ensure that we utilize the hardware the most efficiently.

We’ve managed to optimize how Pentaton scans for changes in the folders you gave it access to so that any modification gets reflected practically immediately. While we don’t have a classical “Library” on purpose and do believe in folder-based navigation and organization, we’ve also enhanced how we cache audio metadata and artwork. This saves a lot of round trips which makes things much faster, especially if you’re accessing music over the network.

Improved sorting

While we do have our own preferences on how to structure our music library, we realize we’re not all the same and might have different opinions. Pentaton defaults to using audio metadata for sorting tracks (based on the track number attribute) and albums (based on the artist name, including support for sorting keys). If you prefer to go by file and directory names, you can switch to using that in the Settings app now.

More prominent use of album artwork

We love album artwork and we want to see them whenever it is possible. With our latest speed improvements, we were able to start showing them in list views without sacrificing loading times.

On album views, we’re now defaulting to a smaller artwork size so that more tracks are visible, but you can just tap on the artwork if you prefer maximum immersion.

Multi-volume albums

Some of our favorite albums are multi-volume sets and we were looking for ways to present them on one screen, just like in the real world where they are still in one sleeve. We’re now showing them grouped by volume in a single view so that you can enjoy them as a whole.