Update Notes: 1.6.01-47

Casting (Sonos / DLNA / Chromecast)

• 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.