The lack of the column browser, along with the general, godawful clumsiness and immoveable wastes of space, in the Audirvana 3.5 interface, eventually led me to downgrade back to Audirvana Plus 3.2, a few weeks ago. I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was, and, once I’d deleted version 3.5, all functions of 3.2 worked perfectly.
I’m now back to using version 3.2.20, and I haven’t enjoyed music so much on my Mac, since before I made the mistake of “upgrading” to the hot mess that is Audirvana 3.5.
The column browser was one of the best, most functional features of previous versions of Audirvana. Not only are the filters located horribly and difficult to use, the column constantly resizes itself, and the built-in assumption that clicking on the name of a second Artist or Album means the user wants both selected is enough to suck one’s will to live, when navigating a large music library. Ever try to scroll back up to deselect Bob Dylan, when you’ve just selected Thelonious Monk, and you have a 3 TB music library? Ever try to do that, in a tiny, square window, where you can’t even read the full names of many artists in your library? If the answer is “no”, to either, you haven’t been using Audirvana 3.5!
Interestingly, Apple did bring back the column Browser, in Apple Music, and, much like in prior versions of Audirvana, they actually allow as many as five different columns now! If only Audirvana could learn a few things from Apple, with respect to basic functionality (not to mention the ease of editing metadata, for which iTunes/ Apple Music is still the best software around).
Long story short, I completed a survey, about Audirvana, a couple weeks back, and I made it very clear that, unless the buggy, horrendous interface is rectified, or at least made infinitely more customizable than in its current state, I will not be paying for further upgrades. I got burned on the latest version of this software, and I won’t let it happen again.
More users, like us, who are unhappy with the Vintage Napster interface of the current iteration of the software, should be more vocal about our opinions, both here and in outside forums. The audio quality, when using Audirvana to play music on a Mac, is unparalleled, but the user interface is just shameful and badly needs to change.
