Ever since the release of iOS 8, the iTunes Store on iOS has become unusably bad for past purchases. Unlike the App Store, where a lovely cloud download button is available for your purchases, you have to go through an arduous process to redownload your music. This forces me to actually connect my devices to my Mac to sync music, which is annoying because it involves iTunes. I haven’t even started talking about lossless music ripped from discs or downloaded from elsewhere. If you’ve ever used an Android device, you know how great it is to just be able to drag and drop your music onto your phone to listen to it. Softorino’s Waltr is the best solution to ridding yourself of iTunes for media on iOS.
One of the main advantages of using the Music.app and Videos.app on iOS is battery life. All third party solutions consume more battery and Waltr aims to reduce that wastage of power. It repackages the files so that the native players support them and takes a considerably smaller amount of time as compared to a file conversion workflow.
When Preshit told me about Waltr, I thought it would be like one of those iFunbox or iExplorer apps, but I was pleasantly surprised. Softorino has created an elegant looking interface that just does what it is supposed to do. Drag media into it while your device is plugged in and you’re done. It displays the free space on your device and has some great glyphs to go along. It takes way less time than actually converting the files and has yet to fail me after use for over a week. I don’t need to bother with converting audio files anymore. I just drag my Bandcamp downloaded FLAC music into the Waltr window and it takes care of the rest.
Dealing with videos on iOS is a lot more painful than audio. I’ve been juggling multiple video players on iOS because most of them don’t play MKV files well and videos with styled subtitles often found in Anime are never played correctly. Waltr’s only shortcomings for me appeared with a few MKV files that had 8 bit audio encoding. Other than that, it transferred 1080p MKV files with subtitles that played flawlessly in the native videos app. It was even discovered that 4k video can be played in the native videos app through Waltr.
Overall, Waltr is something every iOS user should try out. If you use the stock music or videos app, this is like a ray of light in a dark iTunes sky. We also loved the initial walkthrough video idea in the app. Waltr is available for $29.95 and there’s a 14 day free trial available here. I’m still a little skeptical about how long this will work since Apple recently closed the security holes that allowed apps like iFunbox etc to work, but Softorino claim to be safe in their blog post. The only real drawbacks to Waltr right now are the lack of a wireless solution and a Windows app, which are both being worked on right now.