Audirvāna Remote Reviews

AudirvānaRemote is working wonders with a 12 year old MacBook Pro that is feeding a 6 or 7 year old Meridian Explorer 2 DAC. This iteration of the remote app, working on a 2019 iPad Pro, is about as great as it gets. It’s not encumbered with too many details or ways to get things done. Love how I can search a band or song and have the results show up under three tabs, Library which is on an external 4TB HD connected to the laptop, Tidal, and of course Qobuz. I have some 130+ Hi-Rez albums on the disk and I love being able to instantly compare them to the Tidal Masters and the Qobuz High resolution streams. Hint, they are hard to tell apart. AudirvānaRemote is minimalistic yet lightning quick and as I said very powerful. Plus it allows real multitasking on the iPad while using it as the remote. Older remote app would have to reconnect to the laptop every time you went to another app. Now it immediately responds to the current song playing flashing new album art instantly. Love it!

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

If you are interested in the ability to listen to your high quality sound sources as well as search through them Audirvana will address your needs. Usability through the program directly or the iOS remote makes listening easy and enjoyable. Interfacing with Qobuz or Tidal is smoother and much more responsive than through the respective native apps.

Behind the scenes Audirvana takes care of the heavy lift of getting the highest quality sound to your system whether you are wired directly, use AirPlay or through a DAC of your choosing. At a glance you can see the type and bit and sample rate of the music source and the output bit and sample rate to the DAC.

Audirvana is a clear choice if you want a simple yet powerful interface to control your music and quickly get music to your ears.

The remote app purchase isn’t worth it if you’re only playing music from one streaming service and if that music streaming service happens to be Tidal. I initially purchased AudirvānaRemote to benefit from the remote ability, the up sampling option, and what I thought was better music organization on AudirvānaRemote compared to tidal.

I quickly realized that my computer wasn’t capable of handling the processing required for some upsampling—there was also a noticeable drop in fidelity when I attempted to do this. Not to mention the search function on Audrivana was useless—you can’t search through your own streaming library. When you do search you’re looking at the whole online catalog of music. It makes it difficult to pull certain songs from your library. When you do have a fix for a certain song you have to go scrolling endlessly and narrow your search using the a-z or album sorting functions, which is still impossible if you have big library. Not to mention when you search too long you can lose your place because the remote app won’t remember where you were. It turns out Tidal added a search function to their desktop app a little after I purchased the audrivana app so I frequently resort to using Tidal directly.

Setup:
Qobuz and Tidal on a 2012 MBP, standard usb a to B connection to NuPrime Ida-8, audio quest wires, KEF LS50s

Since the last review I placed here things are running smoothly.
One additional request is to have the Remote be recognized by iPhones/iPads as a music player so that I can change the track, pause the music, or even open AudirvānaRemote from my home screen. This would make things so much easier overall.

Also, everything seems to load much quicker (playlists and search results) with the updated versions of the remote. No real complaints to speak of.

5 stars. Well done guys. Keep working at it. As my previous review said, make Roon pay!

Previous review:

The search has improved greatly overall. I enjoy that.

The only thing I think Audirvana needs is the ability to make a playlist from multiple sources. I have both Tidal and Qobuz and when something isn’t on Qobuz, I’ll use Tidal. I wish I could just have one playlist for this.

Keep the updates coming. Make Roon pay.

FIXED:
Still a little glitchy at times. For example, searching Zöe Keating will sometimes make AudirvānaRemote crash. I love how you can control more settings in it.

Audirvana remote allows quick and easy building of live playlist access to your music. Fast and responsive on my iPad Air. It’s fun to swipe through your music looking at the covers, but also great to be able to drill down following an artist or finding different versions of the same song. I especially like the mode where the most recent selection is played next and all of your other selections are played from most recent to oldest. What’s lacking is a way to easily change polarity with the remote and the volume and pause controls are not always immediately available when you are searching deep in the library and a call comes in. Audirvana would not be complete without it, it should be included as it is how I access my music most of the time.

The new remote app is quicker than the old app but in accessing my albums when I choose an album and go back to all albums I’m sent back not to the area I was browsing but to the bottom of my collection. I must then scroll back to the area I was browsing. The old app did not do this. Seems like a minor fix and hope it is corrected soon. Also, the feature to jump to a letter doesn’t show when you go back to the library. Annoying to say the least.

All issues resolved with the new update. I have to give the remote 5 stars with the update. I’ve used Audirvana for years and couldn’t be more pleased.

5 stars audio 0 stars support. Am reposting the problem here:

using the Audirvana remote app regularly crashes the Audirvana software on my computer. This is using a 2019 Macbook and an Iphone, both with the latest (Feb 2020) software. No problem if, say, I’m moving from one song to the next in a playlist or album, but if I search and try to open another song, album, or playlist using the remote, the desktop app crashes every time. Have reinstalled several times but no change. Have posted about this in the community forum several times (and it seems a lot of other people have the same issue), but no response. Fyi I've used Roon software and its app and they perform perfectly together, but I prefer the audio quality via Audirvana. Still, this remote issue is potentially a dealbreaker.

I use the Audirvana Mac app to stream Qobuz (replacing Tidal) through an iMac to Audioengine A5+ and through an older Macbook Pro to adecent audio system. The sound quality for both setups is noticeably improved with Audirvana, and the recent improvements to the iOS remote app finally make it a match to the quality of the main Mac app that it is meant to control. The old version was adequate but clunky. The new one is easier to use, provides a much faster link to the computer (nearly instantaneous), and is notably better looking. Both the Mac and iOS apps are worth the cost if you value high-quality music.

It used to be that if you wanted to listen to “Hi-Fi” class music on a computer you had to put up with a terrible user interface. With its current version Audirvana has become a first class music app with first class sound, to the point that it is making me wonder which link in my playback chain is the weakest: NAD DAC&Pre, B&K Power or the B&W speakers?
Good Show Audirvana!!!
The combination of the mac mini with the player and the remote is fantastic!!!
Next step, need to connect to a music store that allows you to download hi-res files...

I have been using Audirvana and the Audirvana remote app for years. As a software engineer I appreciate How well constructed both apps are. And as an audiophile I think the the combination produce the highest quality sound in my system that I have heard from a digital front end. But both apps (especially the remote) can be inconsistent. Sometimes The apps loose contact with the targeted playback hardware (DAC/ Ultrarendu). Sometimes while playing a song the index into the data stream gets corrupted and I get piercings white noise. Sometimes the database looses its coherence and I choose one song via the remote app but get another. Rebooting both Audirvana main apps usually clears this up.

Even with these short comings I would recommend this application.

It connects to the computer about 70% of the time and when it does you have to wait about 1-3 minutes for it to connect. That doesn’t really work when you just want to hear a song. If you’re the kind who listens to full albums like me or just keeps one station playing it’s fine. The other 30% of the time you have to shut down Audirvana on your computer and restart it. My wifi signal is quite strong.

By the way when it fails to connect it gives you the option “Having trouble connecting to Audirvana”? Clicking on that brings you to a page called “Getting Started with Audirvana “. Uhm ... thanks.

I have been using Audirvana + App running from a Mac for a number of years. I cannot fault the system, I have tried many, many other combinations and it’s the one I keep coming back to. Once setup -which can be as complex or simple as you want - it just gets out of the way and lets you get to and enjoy your music, whether it be server based or from a streaming service.

System:
Mac (Audirvana) > Pi4 i2s > Soekris Dac > Valve Pre > SS monoblocks > OB Speakers

All the convenience of controlling your HiRes music including volume from your phone but with the super quality of music coming from your desktop HiFi equipment and the wonderfully sounding Audirvāna HiRes player. I’ve tried every combination out there (Roon, Tidal, iTunes, etc.) and the Audirvana Qobuz combo with the Audirvana app is the only one that delivers the total package if the highest quality sound and convenience is your end game. Bravo.

I had the prior version and it always hung up but this one is stable. It give me almost everything I get from the desktop but most importantly it lets me choose what I want to hear. Interface is straightforward enough. I use it on both an iPad and iPhone and of course the iPad s easier because it is bigger but both work the same.

This version is more stable than before. It easily let’s you select between local and streaming libraries.

Two things I would like to see improved: 1 it controls output, but doesn’t really change the main computer display. It would be nice if the content of remote display and computer tracked each other. 2 I don’t see how to like Qobuz playlists and add them to favorite from the remote. I can add individual tracks but not playlists.

I’m running Audirvana on a Windows 10 computer with the remote running on my iPad. When I start up the remote it’s a really fabulous app, and controls the program very well. But after a few minutes it invariably loses contact with my computer. To get it to work again I have to not only restart AudirvānaRemote , but restart the program on my computer as well. That sort of defeats the whole purpose of a remote, doesn’t it? Audirvana has been aware of this problem for months, but no fix. I’m really sorry I spent money on this program. I’ve run JRiver and its remote program for years and never had a problem like this.

When AudirvānaRemote properly connects to Audirvana it’s great to use, albeit a little sluggish. My problem is it will not reconnect after sleeping my phone 90% of the time and it reconnects just fine as soon as I restart the program on my laptop. Maybe there’s some communication issue over the network because I’m using the Windows Version which I know is new. Although my WiFi connection on both devices is fine. When using MonkeyMote with foobar2000 it works flawlessly. Audirvana may cost a lot less than Roon but it’s remote is actually less convenient most of the time.

I wanted an app for my Mac that could access my music collection, play Qobuz, and work with a remote app. Audirvana does all three. The remote is quick to connect. Also, because I already own multiple devices with DLNA built in, AudirvānaRemote allows me to switch where music plays at the touch of a button.

I originally purchased AudirvānaRemote for use with a MacBook Pro running Audirvana and a streamer connected to my DAC. Everything worked fine. I now have a dedicated Windows 10 machine running my music directly to my DAC. The application works but the remote does not. This has been a major known issue for over a year and there does not seem to be any initiative by Audirvana to address or fix it. You can check the Audirvana support site yourself and see the numerous issues around the remote that have not been addressed. Don’t waste your money on the application or remote app.

This allows me to control Audirvana from my iPad at my listening position. I have been so far unable to figure out how to add items to a playlist. My major concern is that, in album view, it displays a matrix of thumbnail album covers, but does not show the entire name of the album. With a composer who wrote a lot of symphonies, it a very frustrating to see a bunch of names like “Symph...Op. 27”. It would be very helpful to have the option to have the albums displayed in a list view, with full album titles.

When showing artists, only the top several will proceed to the artist when selected. This is a problem with the Local library as well as the Tidal favorites.

Also the older app would list the MQA tracks/albums whereas the only way to know that they are playing is when one selects the playing screen. Even the playlist won’t display this information. This is a huge step backward.

The layering of screens is frustrating. I prefer the user interface of the older app with the playlist always being shown (with the MQA designations shown).

Being able to control your music from anywhere in the house using your phone takes the Audirvana experience to the next level. AudirvānaRemote has a very attractive design and is very easy to use. Absolutely recommended!

As I’ve been a user of A+ since 2015, I’ve found it’s a very very good match with an Apple Mac Mini as its audio software, and have compared it to several to which I won’t name here........., my only complaint ( and while not a biggie for some ) is I wish Damien would increase the overall size of the album covers, whereas maybe 5-6 could be used per roll, where as the standard 9 forces said imagines to be much smaller than I had grown used to on the old iTunes remote.

Other than that, the Sonics are amongst the best I’ve laid ears on. A+++++++++++++ ( pun intended ).

O_o scar Johnson
USA

Gives me access and control of both my iTunes purchased and ripped local collection as well as Qubos streaming service running through Audirvana on my headless 2012 Mac mini all from one remote. Just what I wanted.

I have the latest Media Center 25 and Roon running on a 2018 Mac Mini i7 16GB w/2TB SSD into a Gryphon Diablo DAC/amp. Between these three products, Audirvana sounds the best. Given the cost, quite frankly it’s amazing. On the other hand, the utility and intuitive layout are amateur efforts bested by high school students.

To be taken seriously, at least look at your competion and copy them. You have won the inexpensive good sound battle but mire the user to incompetent UI。

Does what its supposed to do. It does seem to get hung up from time to time between Tidal and the network. But a restart usually clears it all up. Im glad they finally made AudirvānaRemote free. Not because im cheap it just seemed like insult to injury when it was all buggy.

Very nice to be able to browse my collection from the beanbag and change tracks.
Sometimes has difficulty connecting with the computer after tracks have stopped playing so giving 4 out of 5.