Pentaton 1.3 is out and it is faster than ever

While audio quality is our number one priority when building Pentaton, we’re also committed to providing the smoothest, fastest browsing experience. We’ve completely rebuilt Pentaton’s metadata parsing and caching mechanism, making it 15 times faster when browsing and 3 times faster when scanning your audio files.

Why speed matters

Pentaton does not have a traditional library of its own, it scans files and folders constantly to make sure you’re always seeing the latest contents of your audio files and you never have to manually synchronize. This happens in the background so it will not block you from browsing, but the faster it gathers all the changes the less disruptive it is to display them. Our goal is to always show you what you expect to find instantly, or as close to instantly as we can get.

How we did it

We painstakingly went through all the steps involved when browsing to a folder in Pentaton and checked if the step can be removed, made faster or broken down to smaller tasks that can be executed in parallel. We found cases for all of these and managed to speed up checking for updates by around 3 times for both locally stored files and files on network shares.

We also switched from Apple’s built-in storage mechanism to a custom, low-level implementation so that we could tailor the storage and data fetching exactly to the usage characteristics of Pentaton, resulting in a crazy 15-fold reduction in the time it takes to display the contents of a folder.

What’s next

With version 1.3, Pentaton is already at the forefront of iOS audio players when it comes to audio quality and browsing experience thanks to its proprietary audio engine and metadata parsing mechanism. Now, we are planning on going after convenience. Stay tuned!