github jmshrv/finamp 0.9.20-beta
Finamp Beta Update 0.9.20
on GitHub

pre-releaseone day ago

Hi everyone!
Welcome to the seventh Finamp beta update of the year!
It's been a while since the last update, with many of the core contributors being busy with life. That doesn't mean we don't have some exciting new features and improvements in store for you, though!
Check out the full release notes below for all the details!

Caution

While the brand new Jellyfin version 10.11.x is now out, we heard several reports about significantly reduced performance for music libraries. This means slow load times throughout Finamp, and even in the official apps.
Therefore we urge you not to upgrade to 10.11 yet. We are certain that these performance issues will be resolved in a short while as testing continues.
The only improvements related to Finamp introduced with 10.11 are word-by-word lyrics highlighting (if you have the necessary files), and the ability to remote-control Finamp sessions through non-admin accounts using the official apps. If these features aren't essential to you, we recommend to wait before upgrading.

We will inform you once our recommendations change. Thank you for your understanding, and honest thanks for the Jellyfin team to following through with this massive undertaking! Even though there are some issues now, we absolutely appreciate the structural improvements made in 10.11 and the effort and passion the whole team poured into this ❤️. This will also affect Finamp's development positively.

TL;DR

New Features:

  • Edit playlists, including reordering tracks
  • Redesigned playback options
  • Custom accent colors

Bug Fixes:

  • Fixed automatic offline mode not resuming in some scenarios
  • Fixed playing wrong track when sorting randomly while offline
  • Fixed gray overlay when reordering tracks
  • Fixed lyrics not updating during a downloads repair
  • Fixed various startup errors

Note

Throughout the release notes you will find links marked with the 🔗 icon; these links will open Finamp to the relevant screen, so that you can play around with the new settings right-away!

How to join the Beta (click to expand)

The beta is free and open to everyone, but we'd like to get as much feedback as possible. So please do try it out and then let us know what you think!

  1. Join the Finamp Beta Testers Discord server
    • This step is optional, but since we're looking for feedback, it would be great if you could join!
    • Alternatively, there's a discussion for the beta right here on GitHub: Redesign Beta discussion
  2. Take note of your current Finamp settings, since this is a beta it could happen that the update changes some of them.
    • Downloads should be migrated, but since the new download system is completely different, there might be inconsistencies.
  3. On Android, join the beta on Google Play or download the APK file from below.
    On iOS, join the beta on TestFlight.
    • We're currently not able to offer a beta on F-Droid (more info here), but you can use an app like Obtainium to automatically download the latest APK from GitHub.
  4. Open Finamp and enjoy!

Keep in mind that not all of the text in the beta has been translated yet. If you're missing a translation, you can now contribute it on Weblate!

Important

We've updated some default settings related to downloading to improve performance while downloads are running. These should decrease lags without slowing down downloads, and we recommend everyone to apply these new defaults.
To do this, open the 🔗 Downloads Screen, scroll to the bottom, and set "Download Worker count" to 1 and "Max Concurrent Downloads" to 5.
Alternatively, you could reset all download-related settings to their defaults by tapping the reset button at the top right of the 🔗 Downloads Screen. This will however reset all settings on the downloads screen to their defaults, which you might not want.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed 🔗 Automated Offline Mode not resuming after overriding it once while in "Local Network" mode (thanks @flloschy!)
  • Fixed colored bars appearing at the top and bottom of the screen in some cases when scrolling (thanks @Komodo5197!)
  • Fixed wrong track being played when tapping a track on the "Tracks" tab when using random sorting in offline mode
  • Fixed gray/white overlay when reordering tracks in the queue (thanks @Komodo5197!)
  • Fixed gain (volume) not resetting properly for tracks without normalization data
  • Fixed the new "album gain" (for consecutive tracks from the same album, when in "Dynamic" mode) when Finamp is in the background (thanks @HeroBrine1st)
    • Finamp would stop fetching some metadata while in the background, causing the wrong gain to be applied
  • Fixed download errors after updating media images (thanks @Komodo5197!)
  • Fixed lyrics not updating during a downloads repair
  • Fixed various startup errors (thanks @Komodo5197!)
    • When user-installed certificates can't be trusted
    • The database compaction file already exists
  • Fixed finamp:// links opening in a broken second instance on Windows
  • Fixed local server address sometimes not saving after editing it
  • Fixed artist albums not playing in chronologic order, even though they're displayed like that (thanks @lukaslindnermusic!)

What's New

Playlist Editing (thanks @F-4Dev for the initial implementation!)

One of Finamp's long-standing limitations as a music client has been that it wasn't possible to reorder the tracks of a playlist.
While we've recently added the ability to change the sorting of playlists within the apps, this is only temporary and not synced with other clients.

So we're happy to let you know that this is finally possible, using the brand new edit playlist screen!
If your user account is the owner of a playlist (and you're not offline), you should now see a new option in the top bar and menu of playlists that lets you edit the playlist. This will open the playlist in an edit view where you can change its name, visibility, image, and tracks.
You can rearrange tracks, remove them, and also restore them from the bottom if you removed them by accident. In the future we'll also give you a away to easily add more tracks to the playlist, for now you'll have to use the menu of the item you want to add for this.

Keep in mind that in order to update the playlist image, your user account needs to be able to change media metadata in Jellyfin, which is tied to the administrator permission ("Allow this user to manage the server"). The Jellyfin team recommends not using admin accounts in normal clients (like Finamp), so you might still want to use the Jellyfin app to manage your playlist images.

New Playback Row Interaction (thanks @lukaslindnermusic!)

In a previous update we've simplified Finamp's menus, integrating all options for playback into a single, horizontally-paged row that lets you play, shuffle, and queue up an item.

In this update, we've extended this to the actual album, playlist, artist, and genre screens as well.
Instead of having two large, colorful buttons for play and shuffle, you now get this "Playback Row" that has all former options and more, and will remember the last-used "target" for playback (i.e., adding to queue, to Next Up, or starting playback right away).
As part of this, we've changed the categories for the playback row, from "Play" and "Shuffle" to "New Queue", "Play Next", "Append Next", and "Play Last", with options for playing in order or shuffled in each category.

All of this should make playback options more apparent, make Finamp's design a bit more coherent, and reduce needed taps for frequent actions. The menu button has moved to the top right of the screen as part of this change.

We hope you like this new interaction!

Custom Accent Color (thanks @likhithpraveenk!)

While Finamp lives from its adaptive colors based on media images, there are some parts of the app that were always a certain shade of blue. This is Finamp's default accent color.

With this update however you can now change this accent color to whatever color you like! The accent color will then be used to create a cohesive theme that is used in all parts of the app that aren't adaptively themed.
Right now this is limited to one single, static color, but we hope to integrate Android's adaptive "Monet" theming (based on the device wallpaper) down the road. We appreciate any assistance with implementing that :)

Play Individual Discs of Albums (thanks @HeroBrine1st!)

Since albums disc are sometimes split into different types of tracks (acoustic versions, instrumental, etc.) we've now added the ability to play just a single disc of an album. The disc header can now be tapped, swiped, or long pressed, just like a track can be. And similar to albums, you can play, shuffle, add to Next Up, and so on!

Word-by-Word Lyrics Highlighting! (thanks @Maxr1998!)

This was actually already implemented in 0.9.19, but we're including it here since coincidentally the new Jellyfin update 10.11.x just got released, which is required for this feature to work.
If you have synced lyrics in the required format (with word-level timestamps), Finamp will now use these to highlight the current word in proper Karaoke fashion!

*Please keep in mind that we don't recommend upgrading to 10.11 at this time (see the top of these release notes). However, if you're excited for this feature, it should be working just fine.

When is the Home Screen finally coming?!?

At the end of last release notes we noted that discussion was still ongoing. We've now settled on an improved design, that stays very close to Finamp's existing structure and navigation, while still introducing the home screen as a central hub for browsing suggestions.
So while this update does not, the next update will include the new home screen. This will most likely be the last major change before this beta version transitions to the stable channel. Thank you for being patient with us!

Other Changes

  • Reduced the amount of errors queued up, limiting them to unique errors and silencing some common but unproblematic errors completely
  • Finamp now correctly reports the transcoding status to the server
    • Due to some limitations in the Jellyfin API, not all infos (target codec, bitrate, reason) are reported, but it doesn't say "Direct Playing" anymore when it's actually transcoding
  • Added a setting to toggle favorite state on tap instead of opening the add to playlist menu (thanks @HeroBrine1st!)
  • Added a setting to automatically start playing restored queues (including on startup!) (thanks @Komodo5197!)
  • Enable the "Fast Scroller" (alphabet bar) when sorting by album artist on the albums and tracks tabs (thanks @Maxr1998!)
  • Disabled adding items to "Next Up" (or playing them next) on Windows and Linux
    • This currently isn't working due to a bug in a library we use, and it's causing bugs and confusion
  • Updated the base volume normalization gain on iOS and desktop, to increase the default volume for most libraries
  • Finamp now remembers the last state of the previous tracks section in the queue panel, so that the next time you open the queue the previous tracks are still expanded, if they were expanded before you closed the panel
  • Scroll bars on the lyrics screen are now only shown when manually scrolling (thanks @ios7jbpro and @Komodo5197!)
  • External downloads now use an improved directory structure and the original file name for downloaded tracks
    • This change does not apply to already downloaded media
  • When trying to add a download location in an unsupported location, Finamp will now warn you about potential issues (thanks @Komodo5197!)
  • Many more improvements to details and performance that you might notice (mostly contributed by @Komodo5197, thanks!)

New Settings

Changed Settings

Upcoming Features

We have a lot of features planned for the future, and we're always open to new ideas. Here are some of the things that we're planning to add:

  • A proper home screen
  • Radio modes for continuous playback
  • Desktop Support
    • This is now in a "soft release" stage, where it might already be available for your platform. An official release will happen in the future, but is currently not a priority.
  • ???

You can take a look at the full list and current progress in the Redesign project.
We also have a more up-to-date hackathon project board: https://github.com/users/jmshrv/projects/5

Let's hope we can push out the next update a bit faster, on our way to the finish line of a proper stable release!
We're still looking for new contributors and hope that you'll help us make this app even better!
Thank you for using Finamp!

- Chaphasilor

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