OK, so I just gave AO a try. I’m coming from Audirvana 3.5. Basically, I’ve always thought of Audirvana as a mediocre piece of software, particularly given the price. It gives me better sound quality than iTunes/Music and that’s important but does essentially nothing else better. I was hoping AO would be an improvement.
And the good news is that on many fronts, it is—so well-done for that. However, $90 is a lot to ask for the upgrade. So, I’ve found some issues that make me hesitant to spend that money. These are specific to AO, and I see that versions of these have been mentioned in another thread, but these bear repeating:
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I cannot see a list on the left of all my playlists like I could in 3.5. These are sync’d from iTunes/Music and the only way to see them is to click on “My Playlists,” but I don’t get a list on the left. This leads to the following:
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Navigating sync’d playlists is SLOW. I mean really distressingly slow. I click on “My Playlists” and it reacts fine, but when I click on an individual playlist, I get the spinning beach ball… for about 20 seconds. (I timed it multiple times, always about 20 seconds.) This is macOS Catalina on an iMac Pro, so an intel box, but a fast one. A full 20 seconds is bananas for this, just not acceptable. What gives? (And yes, I’ve tried re-building my indices.)
The rest of these were true in 3.5 and just aren’t better in AO, which I was hoping would improve the old UI:
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Most of my tracks are greyed out. They still play and work just fine, but the greyed-out text is hard to read. Any idea why most (the VAST majority) are greyed out?
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No control of what information is visible in the columns in the standard list view. I was hoping I’d get more control over this, like in iTunes/Music. For example, I really don’t care about “Composer” in playlists that are primarily rock. I’d like to add “Year” to the display for most of my lists. That kind of thing.
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Cannot sort the views of playlists. Not by TR, not by Title, not by Artist, nothing. Again, handled so much better in iTunes/Music.
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No volume control via AppleScript. If you’re going to give us an AppleScript interface (and HOORAY for that, by the way), please please please allow control of volume. (I understand this a a really small detail.)
Maybe some of this stuff is in the manual… whoops, there’s no manual. JIT documentation is great, but it doesn’t feel particularly complete or comprehensive. Maybe a manual would be a good idea, too.
