• Background casting fixed. Starting a cast took the app out of the foreground, and Android then froze it and cut its network about 5 seconds after you left the app. The app now stays in the foreground for the whole cast. This also covers Chromecast.
• Lost-stream recovery. When Sonos drops a stream it reports it as paused at 0:00. The app now resumes at the same spot instead of treating it as you pausing.
• Track transitions made reliable. When playback stalls between tracks, the app now:
  • advances to the next track if the song had reached its end;
  • retries a track that never started, then skips it;
  • resumes playback that stopped mid-track.
• Track change fixes:
  • Play is confirmed after every track change.
  • Two tracks with the same title no longer block each other.
  • Two track-change requests no longer collide on the speaker.
• Hi-res on Sonos. FLAC above 48 kHz, DSD, APE and Opus are converted per track to 320k MP3. Any track the speaker refuses is retried as a conversion before it's skipped.
• Sonos room names now show in the device list and the "Casting to…" banner.
• Cast seek. Notes on seeking Sonos casts, and cast paths kept separate from the playback cache.

Playback

• First track of lossless files no longer stalls or skips. The app starts playing sooner, and the stall watchdog only steps in when the buffer is truly frozen.
• &Playback=0 on audio stream URLs. JRiver no longer throttles delivery or holds a session open for each connection.
• ALAC plays. It was silent while the timeline kept moving. It's now detected and played through JRiver's converter.
• Unplayable formats converted up front. The app checks which formats the phone can decode, so pre-cached and gapless tracks are built as playable streams from the start.
• Server mode: the queue no longer jumps to track 1 when you pick a song.

Now Playing

• Stars + heart row. Star ratings come from JRiver's Rating field. Read-only servers show a message instead of saving.
• Phone art fits the screen.
• Less art flicker when swiping. The blurred background shares the art's image cache, a leftover retry no longer forces a reload, and a slow online art lookup can't land on the wrong track.
• Format line centered under the seek bar, e.g. 96kHz/24bit · FLAC · 2886 kbps. It comes from the same single request as the rating.
• Amber "TC" badge on the art whenever the audio is a JRiver conversion (being transcoded).

Track lists

• Album views show track numbers, plus a third line 4:05 | FLAC. ALAC and AAC are told apart.
• Playlist views and the play queue show the same third line.
• Search → album and Recently Played / Recent Imports albums now keep duration, track number and file type.

Artist blacklist

• Better matching. Tracks with several artists (;-separated) are checked artist by artist, and "Dead, The" now matches "The Dead".
• Now applied in:
  • the first song of a shuffle
  • Android Auto and voice (genre, AI Daily, Spotlight)
  • AI Daily generation, and already-cached AI Daily playlists
• Service loads the list itself, so filtering also works when Android Auto starts playback without the app open.

Dashboard & browse

• Browse tiles use artwork assembled from your own albums, with each cover used only once across tiles. The tiles rotate daily and are prepared in advance.
• Music-only dashboard. Audiobooks and podcasts are excluded from carousels and shuffle.
• Spotlight minimums enforced: at least 10 tracks and 3 distinct albums, in both the app and Convex. This stops single-track "Deep Dive" playlists.
• Genre shows on Now Playing again, which also restores Adaptive Genre EQ for those tracks.
• Remote button hidden off-LAN.
• New action bar on the albums-under-artist and genre levels.
• Art that loaded but never displayed now appears.
• "Performing Near You" event cache cut from 6 days to 2.
• Fixes carried over from the 1.5.06 batch:
  • local sequential queue
  • Recent Imports download
  • search grouping by album artist
  • scroll position
  • carousel art when switching between LAN and cellular

Video

• Offline download from the movie and episode screens saves the original file, with its details and poster saved beside it.
• Local Video tab with Movies and Shows.
• Download progress button; progress survives leaving the screen.
• Play and Delete on local videos.
• Duplicate library entries merged.
• Scanned TV episodes open the episode screen.

Artist bios & Play Doctor

• Bio lookup fixes. Words like "television" or "film" no longer disqualify a match. Compilations fall back to the track's artist. Cached bios carry a version number so bad ones get re-fetched.
• Play Doctor lists are seeded from the actual track, so they're no longer random (previous bug).
• Recommended refreshes per track instead of per artist.

Improved streaming continuity for Access Key connections when breaking the LAN --> Cellular barrier while streaming audio

DLNA Casting seek fixes + Better casting on Sonos devices.

More UI modifcations

Library Layout mode (internal) - Detects when a custom browse menu is used and it incompatible with the smart view that is default.  If it detects a break in the default structure, it will default to showing the raw JRiver view that the user defined without breaking core dashboard section and functionality

Given no show stoppers, I will be submitting new release build to Google Play Store likely tomorrow.

More language packs

Free Trial Period

Shuffle All nearby Artists playing near you

Smart Artist filtering? (blacklisting)

Social tiles - show who you are sharing with plus mior UI changes

- Bugs/Improvements

Speed Improvements (Shuffling large collections, Image loading)

Some navigation quirk fixes (back button)

More Streaming continuity enhancements (for poor connections/transitions)

Genre to Preset EQ mappings plus all new presets

Listening mode: Home, Auto, Headphone

EQ Intensity: Low, Normal, High

Add multiple tracks to playlist (check boxes)

Implemented more streaming continuity techniques

Play/Shuffle with Play Doctor (for JRiver users)

Expanded Recent Imports # on dash and own screen (with more imports and a shuffle option)

Lots of small bug fixes

Play/Shuffle with Play Doctor (for JRiver users)

Expand Recent Imports # on dash and own screen (with more imports and a shuffle option)

Allow for multiple tracks to be added to playlist in one call.

Refine Spotlight playlist logic to reduce duplicate spotlights as well as work on better ways to make more interesting

Preset EQ replacement/expansion AND Genre -> to -> EQ Preset/Custom matching (dynamic EQ based on Genre) - new screens

Bug: Found a logic bug when searching by name of a track.  Producing 0 results when search term is more than 1 word.

Bug: found a bug in JRiver Play on Server mode.  Can lose polling in some cases.  Screen doesn't update and can't go to next or prev tracks

ANything else?

added option to transcode or keep original format when downloading

fixes..
JRiver was defaulting to transcoding to mp3 (whoops) from a previous buffer test
When transcoding to mp3 for downloads, JRiver does not embed tags into the file, fixed this using JAudioTagger  using JRiver metadata

Lots more items....

 

Podcasts Dashboard Section
Section now always visible (previously hidden if no subscribed podcasts)
A "Search" tile appears first, using the thumb_podcasts cover image, and navigates to PodcastIndex search
Subscribed podcast tiles follow the Search tile
Context Menu

Other
"Play Now" and "Shuffle Now" options no longer appear when long-pressing an individual track (they remain for folders/albums)
JRiver Play Tracking

Added File/Played API call to JRiverApiService and JRiverRepository
Called at the same time local play history is recorded, so JRiver's "Number Plays" and "Last Played" fields stay in sync
Album Labels

Browse Screens
Maximum label lines on browse screens increased from 2 to 3

Play Queue Drag-and-Drop
Tracks in the Play Queue can now be reordered by long-pressing anywhere on the track row and dragging
Removed the dedicated drag handle column that was previously required

Added sh.calvin.reorderable:2.5.1 dependency

Social Backend (jr_users)
Changed Encryption (at rest)


New Audio features::
Phase 1: DSP Pipeline + Parametric EQ — 7 files created/rewritten, 3 existing files modified
Phase 2: ReplayGain — 2 new files, 4 existing files modified
Phase 3: Gapless Playback — 0 new files, 1 existing file modified
Phase 4: Bit-Perfect / Hi-Fi Mode — 2 new files, 2 existing files modified
Phase 5: UX Polish — 1 new file, 2 existing files modified

Added additional Gain setting for tracks that have no ReplayGain metadata
Compact "Hi-Fi" / "DSP" badge for NowPlaying screen