v0.14.0 is a HUGE update to Lagu, bringing loads of new features, improvements, and of course Android TV, and Android Auto. The goal of this version was initially to bring on Android TV and Auto, and work on some more minor bugs and features for other platforms, but that changed, and now every platform has received some big improvements and new features! The full changelog is below, and a quick warning it is long! If you encounter any issues, or have any questions, feel free to reply to this thread, open a new thread, or reach out via the main website: Here
Once again, thank you for trying Lagu, and submitting feedback and bug reports! Amazon support for Fire OS will be coming soon, as of now Vega OS is not planned as it would be a new native platform, if there is a good amount of feedback or requests for Vega OS, it can be explored. Fire OS supports traditional Android APKs making it a seamless addition to Lagu's platform support. You can now select Fire OS as an option for beta registration.
One last note, Android Auto has been tested in a simulator, but not tested in a vehicle, so if you run Android Auto any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
What's new in 0.14.0
All platforms
- Autoplay when the queue ends. Turn it on and a finite queue never falls silent: Lagu keeps playing music that sounds like the last few tracks you queued. It arms while the last track is still playing, so rolling into the guessed music is seamless rather than a pause, and Up Next captions the boundary with "Autoplay, from" whatever album, playlist or artist you started, so you can always see where your queue ended. It is off by default, lives in Settings under Playback, and has an infinity toggle in Up Next on desktop, iPhone and Android phone.
- Autoplay tries harder before it gives up. If the server has not sonically analysed a track, Lagu now falls back to the artist's popular tracks and then to an artist station, so one track album, an interlude or a fresh import still keeps the music going. A dropped moment of Wi-Fi no longer counts as a dead end, and a seek or a skip asks again. When there genuinely is nothing nearby, it stops quietly rather than throwing an error at you.
- Anything you do outranks Autoplay. Adding a song, starting a station, arming the Guest DJ, setting repeat or switching it off all drop the guessed tail immediately, and never disturb the track that is playing.
- Smart Fades. A fixed crossfade fades songs that are already fading and swallows songs that end on a hit. Lagu now reads the loudness shape of the track and starts the fade where the song actually fades, or refuses to fade at all on an abrupt ending and hands over gaplessly instead. On by default while crossfade is on, with one switch to put the old behaviour back.
- Loudness leveling lands on the first note. The level is now set before a track's first sample instead of sliding into place, so a song no longer starts a fraction of a second too loud or too quiet. Two differently levelled tracks also hand over gaplessly again.
- Downloads is a hub, not one long scroll. On desktop, iPhone and Android phone, Downloads opens on the storage card, a short Recently Downloaded shelf and one counted row per kind: Playlists, Artists, Albums and Songs. Each row opens a full screen with its own sort and, on most kinds, a list or artwork toggle that is remembered. The whole thing still draws with the radio off.
- Downloads knows your artists. Downloading three albums by one artist used to give you three unrelated rows. There is now an Artists section, with the artist's real photo rather than their record sleeves, compilations collapsed into a single Various Artists row, and a page that lists their albums plus every downloaded song of theirs from anywhere on the device.
- Songs you already heard can be re-queued. History rows in Up Next now offer Play Next and Add to Queue, with the same labels and ordering as every other track menu, on desktop, iPhone and Android phone.
- Network speakers. Lagu can play to a DLNA speaker on your network from desktop and Android phone. It is off by default in Settings under Playback. Your Plex server has to be on the same network as the speaker, because Lagu hands the speaker a direct server address and never sends your Plex token off your home network. A server that is only reachable remotely is refused with an explanation rather than failing silently.
- Filter by year on Albums and Songs. Pick a year from a searchable list, which matters if you build an albums of the year list. Desktop and iPhone in this release, with Apple TV and Android to follow, the same way the format filter arrived.
Desktop (macOS, Windows, Linux)
- Discord Rich Presence. Show what you are playing on Discord as "Listening to track, artist", with artwork and a progress bar. It is off by default in Settings under Playback.
- Real album art on the Discord card. Discord's own servers fetch a card's artwork from the public internet, so art on your own Plex server can never appear there and every card fell back to the Lagu logo. Lagu looks the album up on Apple's public iTunes catalogue and uses the cover it returns. Only the artist, album and track name are sent to do it, no token, no server address and no account, and there is a switch to turn it off directly under the Discord row.
- Library gains a Genres row, and Styles is a list. Genres used to be reachable only from a Home tile, and Styles was a screen of 150 identical pills with no scan order. Both are now alphabetical lists with sticky letter headers, an index rail and a filter field, and each row resolves a real album cover instead of a glyph.
- The sleep timer is in fullscreen Now Playing. It sits in the fullscreen Up Next header beside Autoplay, not only in the docked queue card.
- Newly Released cards name the artist. A card now reads "Mar 2026, Artist". The date leads, so a long artist name trims at the end and the ordering cue is never the thing that gets cut.
- Settings read like settings. A setting that only applies while its parent is on now sits inside that parent's group behind an indent rule, rather than looking like an unrelated sibling, and the Playback hints were rewritten to one short sentence each.
- An empty Downloads kind is dimmed, not deleted. All four rows always render in the same order, so the hub holds still, and a kind with nothing in it reads "None yet" and cannot be pressed.
iPhone and iPad
- Home screen and lock screen widgets. Now Playing with a real play, pause, previous and next; Quick Play, a grid of what you played last where a tap starts it; This Week, with your plays, top artist and top song; plus circular and rectangular lock screen accessories. The widgets carry no Plex connection at all, so the right cover still shows with Lagu force quit, and they re-skin with your theme.
- Lagu remembers your queue. Force quit or reboot and relaunch: the last queue is back in the mini player, paused where you left it, and Play resumes from there. Nothing loads or streams until you press Play, a downloaded queue comes back with no network at all, and switching servers or signing out clears it.
- Settings, Appearance, System. A third theme option that follows the phone's own light and dark setting across the app, Now Playing, the widgets and the lock screen accessories. It is the default for new installs, and an existing install keeps whatever it was showing.
- Siri knows your playlists by name. "Play my liked songs playlist on Lagu" now works, including smart playlists, which the old lookup could not see at all. Siri also understands "shuffle X", "play genre radio", "play mood music", your loved tracks, "like this song" and "what's playing".
- Settings gains a Remote tab. The paired computer list, reachability, pairing and the per device fingerprint used to be one buried row under Playback. They are now their own tab.
- The Quick Play widget says what it is showing. A titled header and each tile labelled with its title and artist over a scrim, three tiles on medium and six on large.
Apple TV
- Settings is a section rail. Seven sections in one column meant about thirty focus stops to reach the bottom. There is now a left rail beside one pane of rows, focus alone selects a section, and stepping left returns you to the rail item you left.
- Streaming quality and Switch Server. Playback gains the five tier quality ladder the phones already had, honoured on every path, and Account gains Switch Server so moving to another server no longer means signing out of your account.
- Made For You, and Radio where you are looking. Radio gains artist mixes, and album and artist pages gain a Radio button seeded by the record in front of you. An artist mix that could not find sonic neighbours is named honestly rather than promising something it did not deliver.
- Autoplay in Up Next. The infinity toggle is in the Up Next header, matching Settings under Playback, and the boundary caption is drawn exactly where the queue you built ended.
- Play and Pause work while you are browsing. The Siri Remote's play and pause key used to be claimed only by Now Playing, which is the one screen you are least likely to be on when you want to pause. It now works on all six tabs.
- The quality row shows the source and the transcode. A source pill such as "FLAC 16/44.1" with the transcode pill beside it, and one pill on direct play.
Android phone
- Lagu remembers your queue. Same tracks, same order, same shuffle and repeat, same "Playing from" and the same position, back paused on every cold launch. Nothing streams until you press Play, downloaded queues resume with no network, and signing out or switching servers clears it.
- Settings, Appearance, Theme. System, Bloom or Bloom Light. Bloom Light is the iPhone's light theme brought over verbatim, and System follows the phone's light and dark setting. New installs default to System, existing installs are left where they were.
- Sort a playlist's tracklist. Playlist Order, Title, Artist, Album or Recently Added, with a direction toggle, remembered across playlists. It changes what you see and what plays, and nothing is ever written back to the server.
- Settings, Servers can reconnect you to the server you are already on. With one server the only row was disabled, which was a dead end when a reconnect was exactly what you needed. The queue survives it.
- Smart Fades sits inside the Crossfade card. It only shapes a crossfade, so it now lives under the crossfade slider rather than in a card of its own.
Android TV (new)
- Lagu on the television. Lagu now installs on an Android TV box or a Google TV stick as a proper living room app, built over the same core as the phone with Apple TV as the target. Sign in from the couch with a four character code, a QR your phone camera can read, or a paired phone, pick a server that actually answered, and browse a focus first Home with your greeting hero, Recently Played, Recently Added, Newly Released, your server's hubs and your playlists.
- The whole library, merged. Albums, Artists, Playlists and Songs with album, playlist and artist pages, sort menus, genre and format filters, Search, the Genres, Styles and Moods browse, and every library you leave switched on interleaved into one collection.
- Now Playing, with the good parts. Full bleed art on an art driven glow, a five button transport, a seek bar that accelerates while you hold the key, synced lyrics beside the artwork with Select on a line to jump there, and a quality badge. Select on the art fills the screen with the lyrics or the visualizer.
- Visualizers. Spectrum, Nova, Oscilloscope and Trackprint, chosen from a pill on Now Playing or from Settings and remembered. Android's only way to see the audio Lagu is playing is the platform's audio capture, so the first time you turn one on the television asks for microphone permission. Nothing is recorded, nothing is stored, and nothing leaves the device. Decline and you keep the cover art with one line saying why.
- Up Next you can actually edit. Hold Select on any upcoming row for Play Next, Move Up, Move Down, View Album, View Artist and Remove, with the two most recent played rows shown dimmed above the playing one so you can see where an edit landed. Pressing Play over a queue you hand built asks before replacing it.
- Radio, the Guest DJ and Autoplay. Stations, artist mixes, a Home hero that starts the day's mood as a named station, the Guest DJ, and Autoplay at the end of a queue on the same terms as every other platform.
- A phone can drive the television. Android TV is a Lagu Remote host: Settings carries the switch, a QR and a six digit PIN to pair a phone, the paired phone list with last seen and Forget, and a two press reset. It keeps running when you back out of the app, so a paired phone does not drop.
- Scrobbling and Home that remembers this set. Last.fm signs in by QR approval with a typed form one press behind it, ListenBrainz takes a pasted token, and Recently Played is now kept per server on the device, so a playlist you just played shows up on Home immediately instead of minutes later or never.
- The rest of the living room. Smart Fades joins Playback while crossfade is on, album pages gain multi disc sections and a year and song count line, playlist pages page long tracklists with a description and five sorts, Now Playing gains a read only star row with a hide switch in Appearance, and Account gains a Test Connection row and a Plex Pass badge.
Android Auto (new)
- Your library on the car screen. A browse tree of Home, Library, Search and Downloads, following CarPlay case for case, including the pivot to your downloads when the car has no connection.
- Voice search. Ask for an artist, album, song or playlist and the car starts it.
- Artwork without your token. Covers reach the head unit through a token free channel, so your Plex credentials never leave the app.
Fixed
All platforms
- Autoplay could go quiet for the rest of a session. One dead end, or one failed lookup during a refill, could switch it off for good with the toggle still reading on. Both are fixed, and a seek or a skip asks again.
- Streams that Lagu had finished with stayed open on your server. Skipping through an album, changing quality, switching servers or signing out left live jobs running on the Plex server for minutes, visible in Plex's own dashboard. Every path that walks away from a stream now closes it, and never the one that is playing.
- Play Next at a track boundary plays the track you picked. Asking for a song right as the current one ended could play the original next track instead.
- Pairing a second phone could un-pair the first. Paired controllers were filed under a name the connecting device chose for itself, so a device presenting a name that was already in use silently replaced it. Every pairing now gets its own identity, and Forget removes exactly the device you picked.
- A finite queue could quietly start over instead of ending.
- The cover went missing in airplane mode for a downloaded song. Now Playing draws it from the file on the device.
- "Playing from" was blank on every station and mix. The one line that could explain why these tracks are playing was missing on exactly the queues nobody can explain to themselves.
Desktop
- The seek and volume bars could get stuck following your mouse. Let go outside the window, over the title bar, or while the window lost focus, and every later sideways move kept scrubbing or changing the volume. Drags always end now, and the waveform, star ratings and Up Next reordering share the fix.
- Pausing or skipping right on a gapless boundary could go silent while the transport said "playing". A command landing in the fraction of a second before a handover unloaded the audio that was about to play.
- An audible gap when Autoplay refilled the queue. A refill arriving while the next track was being pre buffered threw that work away, which is exactly the gap the pre buffering exists to prevent.
- The Autoplay caption could end up labelling a track you queued yourself. Dragging a song across the boundary moved the song but not the caption.
- The sleep timer's End of queue never fired while Autoplay was on. A refill already in flight appended its tail anyway, so the queue never reached an end and the timer waited forever.
- The fullscreen Up Next panel now says what the Autoplay tail is, and a drop that crossed the boundary no longer lands one row off.
- Quitting seconds after a download could lose the Downloads list. The ledger now survives a fast quit and a momentarily locked file.
- Recently Added, Newly Released and Genres now say when something went wrong. A server that refused the query used to render as an ordinary empty shelf, indistinguishable from "you have no music", with nothing to retry. Home shows a titled retry notice, the grids offer a retry, and a partial failure keeps its rows while naming the library that dropped out.
- Home and Library stopped going stale until an app restart. New additions show up without relaunching.
- A transcode that needs to rebuffer says so instead of silently freezing the transport.
- Choosing a network speaker your server cannot reach keeps the picker open so you can read the explanation.
- A speaker that was still opening the stream is no longer declared broken, which is what made switching to a speaker while paused fail every time.
iPhone and iPad
- Transcoded tracks cut off early and showed the wrong duration. A four minute track could report one minute and stop there. Lagu now checks a finished transcode against the track's real length before believing it.
- A slow transcode start is no longer mistaken for a broken one. A large lossless track converting on a busy server needs longer than a direct stream, and cutting it off early meant you sometimes got the original lossless file instead of the quality you asked for. Slow starts now get more time and one clean retry.
- When a capped stream genuinely cannot start, Lagu loads the original paused with an explanation instead of quietly streaming a lossless file over cellular.
- A queue stopped by three failed tracks in a row now says why (iPhone and Apple TV). Leaving Wi-Fi mid playlist used to burn through the rest of the queue in seconds. Three consecutive failures now stop on the current track, with an explanation in the mini player and on Now Playing.
- A restored playlist keeps paging, so a playlist over 200 tracks no longer stops at the point it was saved.
- Reconnecting to the same server on a different address keeps your queue. Moving between Wi-Fi and cellular used to wipe it.
- The sleep timer's End of Track works with crossfade on. A crossfade handover used to sail straight past it. Playback now stops at the boundary and the queue parks on the next track.
- Signing out closes the open Plex session instead of leaving a paused stream behind, and the widgets fall back to placeholders within seconds rather than after a relaunch.
- Tapping a Quick Play tile no longer kills the app, and the widgets are legible in the light theme.
- The lock screen behaves when the last track ends.
Apple TV
- Transcoded tracks show their real duration and play to the end, and a cache poisoned by the old behaviour heals itself on the first launch after the update.
- Autoplay walks the full ladder, so a single with no sonic neighbours no longer ends the music.
- Up Next can reach the Autoplay pill, with up from the first row or right.
- A track with no lyrics shows the lyrics pill on its own, with the explanation on press, instead of cut off text crammed beside it.
- Stepping left out of Settings lands on the section you were actually reading, rather than one item off.
- Home shows a playlist you played, not only albums.
- Skipping past the last track no longer parks a few seconds into it.
- The quality pills follow a gapless or crossfade handover instead of describing the previous track.
Android phone
- Music comes back when your car's Bluetooth reconnects.
- A very large library lands on Home instead of cycling "Can't reach your server". Several slow queries were fighting each other on a very large section; counts are now looked up lazily, each Home shelf loads on its own, and a slow query is treated as a slow query rather than a wrong server address.
- A transcode the server cut short replayed short for ever. The partial file was cached as if it were complete. A finished transcode is now measured against the track's real length and refetched if it falls short.
- Dragging a row in Up Next no longer swells the volume, and an edit during a crossfade no longer restarts the fade or re-levels the playing track.
- Removing a repeated song removed the wrong copy.
- Changing a library sort reorders what is on screen instantly, with no spinner and no empty grid with retry rows when the network is down.
- Network speakers, five fixes. The handset no longer plays out loud over the speaker when you tap a row; the speaker reads your live queue, so Play Next, reordering, shuffle, repeat and an Autoplay tail all reach it; stopping the speaker from its own app no longer skips the song; a speaker that refuses a polite stop no longer tears down the cast at the first track change; and a speaker is handed a format it can actually decode the first time.
- A Deep Cuts or Artist Mix station feeds itself, instead of draining to a stop when its pool was small.
- Only Android Auto, the Assistant and the system can browse your library from another app. The media browser used to answer any app on the phone. Nothing changes in the car.
Android TV
- Crossfade never ran, so every boundary was a hard cut. Turning crossfade on genuinely changed nothing on a television. It works now, and queue edits made during a fade wait for the fade instead of cancelling it.
- The system media controls follow the music again. Right title, right state, advancing position, and pause or skip from a remote or the Assistant reach the player. A remote or a paired phone can also no longer drive a player that was already torn down.
- The Up Next long press menu could act on the wrong song if the queue moved while the card was open. It also crashed on occasion, and could flash and vanish.
- ALAC sat frozen at 0:00, and skipping onto a track that needed converting looked like a frozen television.
- Pairing works. Phones could pair and then never connect, and the countdown stuttered instead of ticking once a second. Both are fixed, and every already paired device stays paired through the update.
- Declining the microphone once now sticks. The visualizer pill stops asking, says where to enable it, and picks itself up silently once you grant it in Android Settings.
- A station or Guest DJ refill could land in silence, leaving a full Up Next panel with nothing playing.
- An error banner appeared for a track that was not playing. A problem loading the next track is now left alone until the queue actually reaches it.
- Last.fm sign in reaches Connected, or says why not, instead of sitting behind "Waiting" after you had already approved it.
- Album and playlist covers shrink as you scroll, so a long playlist shows a screenful of tracks instead of four.
- Focus behaves. Cards are no longer sliced at the screen edge, the top nav is centred, a second press of the Library tab returns to its root, the Search field is no longer a focus trap, and starting a station over a queue you hand built asks first.
Known limits
Network speakers need your Plex server on the same network as the speaker. If your server is only reachable remotely, the cast is refused with an explanation rather than half working; a Lagu side relay for that case is planned for 0.14.1. Seeking past the part of a transcode that has already arrived still restarts the track on desktop.
Thank you
If you've made it here to the bottom, thank you! Lagu is still in development, but becoming more stable each day, and it would not be possible without feedback from you guys! This release took a bit longer than I had hoped, however many of the improvements and new features I think have made it worth the extra time spent. The next release (v0.14.1) is already under development, so a quick preview at some of the upcoming features:
- Overhauling the Apple Watch app
- Network speaker support for remote servers (DLNA Proxy inside the Lagu client)
- Improved fullscreen visualizers
- And more features & improvements
Once again, thank you for the support and feedback (Public or Private through the main website), if you encounter any issues or problems or simply have a feature request, please feel free to reach out!
