Aurender Conductor

At first I thought Conductor was just plain awful, it’s not at all intuitive. However, once you figure out how to use it, it does function as intended and it accomplishes most necessary tasks. However, it’s missing a lot: It really does need a “makeover”, it looks like it’s from the ‘90’s. More importantly, it needs a much better link to Liner Notes and information about the album/song/ artist. Wikipedia just does not cut it! Also, I’ve discovered that the Wikipedia link only works if you don’t add any custom information in the title on your music collection. I have a very large music collection, so I have 3/4 versions of many albums, and I title them by version or mastering (i.e. DSD, HDTracks, or Vinyl Rip, etc), once you do this, it will no longer pull up the Wikipedia link which is very frustrating! Also, a big feature they have missed, once you create a playlist, there is no way to edit the title of the playlist, you need to recreate the entire thing if you want to change (or fix) its name. Hopefully, a new Conductor app is coming soon with a major refresh, if Aurender won’t give us Roon, then at least please try and copy their interface and features to create a new Conductor that is basically just a plagiarized version of Roon:) On the positive, once you figure out how to actually use it, it functions for the basic needs and the Aurender itself does sound wonderful!

I really like this app, but from the beginning I have been frustrated and annoyed by the sorting algorithm. When a band name begins with “The” or “A”, the app places them at the END of titles in that start with the next letter of the remaining name-string. Thus, “The Beatles” (as one of many examples), appears AFTER Buffalo Springfield in my library instead of between Beastie Boys and Beck, a more natural placement. I much prefer the latter as used by software such as iTunes and Gracenote, both of which ignore the leading “The” when alphabetizing. Your approach makes browsing slower and less natural. It would definitely enhance the user experience. On a less important note, is there any way to add a switch that hides MQA titles in Tidal? My DAC does not support it, nor am I fan of MQA. The duplicate titles waste screen real estate when browsing for music to stream. Other than these annoyances, I really like the app as my way of interfacing with my music server. Update - again, an additional small request. I would appreciate a “play random ALBUM in its entirety” feature. I rarely want to play random tracks (independent of album), but for variety, I miss the iTunes option of randomly playing entire albums, or playing random albums in a playlist of albums.

I work in a hifi shop where Aurender is used extensively, and I also personally own an A10. The Conductor app is, in my opinion, the best and most feature rich app that I’ve come across. Other apps are prettier or perhaps more intuitive but once you learn the ropes with the Conductor it’s incredible how much you can do with it. The app has been very stable for me, rarely crashing or losing the connection. If it does, it’s a quick process to reconnect and your playlist is always still there. The app could use a general visual upgrade as it does look dated but since it works so well I could hardly care. iPhone app would also be great, which they are working on. The Aurender folks work extremely hard to squash bugs and they continually update their app and the servers. They are also very receptive to user feedback, just tell your dealer and they can bring it up to Aurender. We’ve had features changed based on our feedback. Great product, great SOUND, great support. Pretty good app. Keep up the good work.

I am writing this review from a unique perspective, I am totally blind. While there may be things I would always like more in an app, my first question is whether that app is accessible. This app and the Music servers work wonderfully using the built-in text to speech applications on my iPad. Whenever I find a problem, I contact the developer and they make best efforts in fixing the issue. Unlike products like Roon, where the developer doesn’t care at all about accessibility, the Aurender team is totally committed to providing an accessible product. I can access all my several thousand songs by any of the means available to a sighted user. And best of all the music sounds GREAT

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Since the last two sw upgrades, the app will crash randomly quite frequently. It will, of course, as a result lose connection with the Aurender and takes a minute or two to restart/reconnect. Very frustrating. Overall, I like the app if it can be better stabilized and several functions improved--one example is the searching MQA artists is sequential from A-Z with no way to search alphabetically. Actually, the impetus for writing this review was out of frustration during MQA searches--it will ploddingly load screens sequentially and it crashed twice--I could never get past "G" artists without it crashing. Please fix this app Aurender!