Pentaton: HiFi Audio Player

I liked the promise of this app - it might be (one of?) the only “offline” or “local” music player that actually supports playlist files (eg. .m3u files). But it’s a bit of a buggy mess and the UI is still a bit janky in places. Bugs/glitches * Sometimes albums aren’t recognized as albums despite metadata (seems to affect mp3 files exclusively; app still displays album titles but does not show in list of albums) * Can’t consistently add/keep files with special characters in filenames to playlists - not even pound character “#” (which us not escaped correctly for the m3u/m3u8 format, therefore fails to parse every time library is reloaded, and the app is also unable to parse the properly urlencoded-form) * Pressing “edit sections” a few times sometimes causes the app to freeze - Update: only seems to affect iOS 18 and earlier; seems ok on iOS 27 * Sometimes the lock screen / control center buttons (prev/next track) will freeze and become nonresponsive * If library is saved into iCloud, sometimes the app gets into an inconsistent state where it fails to load any track (greyed out as if file not found), and requires closing and reopening library folder. <del>Unintuitive design - swiping the playback bar to go to prev/next track works the opposite from most other apps (with no option to invert controls)</del> Update: the devs added an option for this! I would have loved this, as someone who * doesn’t want to be locked into a streaming service * is tired of iTunes randomly obliterating playlists during sync * wants to build a platform-agnostic, interoperable music library, that can be copied between desktop and mobile devices (without going through a laborious import/export process), is usable from most standard music players, & is entirely under their control I still think this app has great potential; I’d like to see if that bears out in the coming months.