Hi
After music in the setup screen try music/
There is a 2 month trial.
james
OK, I decided to give this another try, since the author updated to version 1.1.1 a week ago. And, I signed up for a subscription to see everything.
I did a quick head-to-head comparison with Soundirok, to see how the features compare that *I* use - as always, everyone else's milage may vary.
Rigelian PROs1. On-boarding is far better with Rigelian, ONCE the author fixes two things (see below)On my network, the app discovered my BDP-1 and I was done, except for the whole "music/" settings thing and changing the default cover art filename (i.e. folder.jpg instead of Folder.jpg)
I was super frustrated by this, as you can read above...
The author needs a simple on-boarding experience to ask you for your default cover art naming.
2. Browse by folder is nice.I keep new music in a separate folder on one of my thumb drives and it's great to browse right into that and pick some music.
However, Soundirok solves this issue (for me) in a more elegant manner - by supporting Intelligent Sets (my favorite feature in Soundirok). I have an "Intelligent Set" that automatically scoops up everything in my New Music folder (by folder) and then allows me to browse just that sub-collection by Artist/Album/Genre. But, setting that up is definitely more complex than just browsing by folder.
3. Browsing your collection is initially fastOne my gripes with the first version was constantly looking at the spinning graphic while Rigelian was loading albums. That seems to have been resolved in the newest version.
So, now, getting up and running is w-a-y faster than with Soundirok, which has the double-edged sword of pre-loading the entire MDP database and album art covers. It's a double-edged because once it is loaded, browsing is very fast (faster than Rigelian). But, for large collections, it can be agonizing to update after loading new music. To-MAY-to, To-MAH-to.
4. Subjectively PleasingI design user interfaces for a living and visual design has both
objective and
subjective elements.
Rigelian "feels" more like a native app than Soundirok; which I believe is because the author took a lot of design cues from the iOS iTunes app.
Soundirok, conversely, has a few "non-standard" design elements. One example with Soundirok is the reckless scaling of fonts to make sure everything "fits". I listen to a lot of classical music and on my iPhone X, despite an incredible display resolution, I struggle to read some of the album captions on Soundirok.
I could go on, but I suspect most users will prefer the visual styling of Rigelian.
Rigelien CONs1. No way to browse by ALBUM ARTISTIf the author of Rigelian was an avid listener of either hip/hop or classical music, browsing would probably have a default of ALBUM ARTIST instead of ARTIST.
UPDATE: as I wrote this, I looked at the "WHAT'S NEW" and see that version 1.1 "Add possibility to filter artists by Album-Artist".
Cool... there it is... as an upper-right action button, labeled "Filter" (which is non-started iOS - it's weird to tap in the upper-right corner and have something slide up from the bottom).
I would expect to see something like this implemented as a toggle; look at Apple mail or calendar apps for inspiration. This function was hard for me to find because I expected this to be a setting - and there don't appear to be any settings for the app.
2. No artist imagesI have a "thumb.jpg" image in each artist sub-folder. Soundirok will pick these up and display these artist images, when browsing as such, and I really like it.
Most iPhone apps I use for music display artist images - like iTunes, Spotify, Tidal, Vox. The artist browsing function "feels" a little barren. Maybe the author can augment with Gracenote and/or images on the BDP drives (I see that James Tanner is testing a beta version that does this).
3. Subscription ModelI am increasingly sick of paying a subscription for a piece of software, unless it offers "can't-live-without" functionality. I am paying hundreds of $$ each month for things like Adobe Creative Cloud and other tools for me and my design team (I own a small design agency). It has made me extra sensitive to the whole "0.99 / month" skim for apps.
So, I will try this for a free trail of 2 months, but unless it starts to approximate the functionality of something like Roon, I will likely cancel. It can be done... the information is all there on the Internet, so we will see what the author can do.
Good Luck with the app!
