Flacbox: Hi-Res Music Player 4+

I can connect to file shares on my Win10 PC. This is amazing, since I WFH I can use my iPad to play MP3's or FLAC and not need to download files and use up my precious (paltry) 32GB of storage. [Any other app that claims SMB but hasn't been updated since 2018 won't let you authenticate with Windows. MS disabled SMB1 and the devs needed to update to SMB2 or SMB3; this app has kept up to date.]

This app also has an EQ, this basically lets me use any halfway decent earphones and make them sound much better. Buying this app with EQ was much cheaper than buying high end wireless earphones. I've used EQ's for years with speakers to neutralize the room acoustics and love them with headphones too. The EQ sliders were missing on iPad but a few emails with the dev and they've got it working in the Dec 2020 build.

The SMB (cloud) playback also seems less buggy, or my Wi-Fi is behaving. The app was pretty unforgiving of bad network connections, but this one hasn't crashed for hours. (Their MP3 EQ app has 3x retry options in the settings but the FLAC one doesn't.)

I have been using this app for my music projects recently, and I love it and think it is much superior to other similar programs, but there are two pretty big issues that are getting me. One: I have a lot of songs that "segue", or bleed into each other and are directly connected, and this app takes a few seconds to apparently "load" the next song. On Apple Music and other programs, seamless segues are allowed, but on Flacbox, there is a pause, which screws up the listening experience. Two: If I am inactive on the app for a day or so, my entire music library erases, and I have to reupload everything from my cloud drive. As soon as it is there, it reattaches the audio tags and assigns songs to their artists and albums, but it takes at least 15 minutes. Also, when I try to use the app on my phone, under the same account, I have to upload my entire music library, again, and wait for all the albums to be assigned. I haven't figured out a way to stop this so far. Both issues are really annoying, but otherwise the app works well. Please pay attention to this review, as I have reviewed the app multiple times stating the same issues, and I can't find a way to email/contact the creator. Thanks

A little less than a year ago I started trying to stream my own (mostly high rez) music collection. I tried several of the obvious choices in the App Store, including Flacbox. It was all pretty frustrating and I gave up on it. Too much effort for buggy software, poor synchronization, missing songs, etc.

Next I tried Roon and Roon Arc. That showed promise at first - but had much of the same problems only at a very high price point. I gave up on that too (I use an Aurender in my main (old fashioned 2 big speaker) system.

A week or two ago I decided to try a few App Store solutions again to see if they might have become more viable. Flacbox was the clear winner and I’ve been working with it on both my iPhone and my iPad. I am thrilled with Flacbox v4.2! Look, nothing in this space is perfect yet. You need some patience and some time to re-download, re-sync, change song orders (with a great sort feature), etc. But now I have 125gb of uncompressed music on both my Apple devices and can use the online files (synced to my Google Drive) to replace downloads whenever I want (I haven’t streamed my online files much yet). Lastly, the Flacbox album display is beautiful.

I highly recommend Flacbox and now just hope the app developer has a sustainable business model and keeps this app and future versions running like v4.2 does now.