v0.14.1 is now available on all platforms! This release primarily focused on stability and core improvements, and closes the known limitations from 0.14.0. You can now use network speakers with a remote Plex server, so you can use DLNA / network speakers when not at home, or if your server is hosted elsewhere. Android Auto has also received a big round of fixes and new features, including playlists and an improved queue. It has been thoroughly tested in a simulator, but if you use Android Auto your feedback would be greatly appreciated!
The other big improvement is with visualizers. They now match the color of your cover art, and fullscreen has received a new immersive look on Apple TV and Android TV. This also brings with it the new Radial visualizer, a nod to all of the classic YouTube visualizers.
More visualizers are coming soon, as well as the overhaul to the Apple Watch app which needs a bit more time to finalize! As always, Lagu would not be where it is without your feedback. If you run into any issues or have anything you want to see in the apps, please leave a reply or reach out via the website! The full release notes for v0.14.1:
What's new in 0.14.1
0.14.0 shipped with three known limits: network speakers needed your server on the same network, the televisions had no fullscreen visualizers, and seeking ahead in a transcode restarted the track on desktop. All three are closed in this release.
All platforms
- Network speakers work with a server that is not at home. In 0.14.0 a Plex server that was only reachable remotely was refused, because the speaker would have needed your Plex token to fetch the music itself. Lagu now fetches the audio and the album art itself and hands the speaker a private address on your own network, so a remote server, a relayed connection or a server in a datacenter can all cast. Your Plex token never leaves the device, and that is now true for every cast, not only the remote ones. Desktop and Android phone.
- Radial, a new visualizer. One smooth circle in the record's own colours, deforming with the music, with the lows at the bottom, a soft glow, an echo ring trailing behind it, and the whole disc breathing with the bass. It relaxes back to a circle when you pause. On iPhone, Android phone, desktop, Apple TV and Android TV.
- Visualizers wear the album's colours in Now Playing. The visualizer in the artwork slot used to be drawn in the theme's colours, so a yellow green ring could sit on a blue record. With dynamic colours on it now takes its colours from the art, and cross fades to the next record's colours on a track change.
- Two colours, even from a one colour cover. A cover that is all one hue used to give a disc in two shades of the same yellow. Lagu now finds a second colour elsewhere in the artwork, or picks a complementary one, and a warm cover gets a warm partner: gold pairs with red rather than blue. The rule is identical on every platform, so a record looks the same on your phone, your desktop and your television.
- Search in Settings. Type what you are looking for and jump straight to the row. On iPhone the field tucks away as you scroll, the way Apple's own Settings does. On desktop a result jumps to the right tab, scrolls to the row and flashes it. It ignores case, accents and punctuation, so "lastfm" finds Last.fm. iPhone, Android phone and desktop.
Lagu Remote (iPhone and Android phone)
- Use the computer's queue, or keep mine. Connecting your phone to a computer always pushed the phone's queue over and replaced whatever the computer was playing, with no warning. When both sides have a queue, Lagu now asks: use the computer's queue, and your phone becomes a remote for what is already playing while its own queue waits paused underneath, or keep mine, which is the old behaviour. If either side is empty it asks nothing. Dismiss the question and nothing changes anywhere.
- Move playback here. After adopting the computer's queue, a row under "This iPhone" or "This phone" in the Play on picker brings the music with you: the phone takes the queue and the position, and the computer pauses.
- Disconnecting is gentler. Disconnect after adopting and the computer keeps playing while your phone returns to its own paused queue.
- A computer that switches remote control off says so. The phone used to sit on "Reconnecting" at a decision you had just made yourself. It now reads "turned remote control off", the transport goes quiet rather than showing a stale picture as live, and "Back to my queue" gets you out. If remote control comes back on, the phone reconnects by itself.
- Android gains "Play here instead" after a minute of a dropped connection, as iPhone already had.
Desktop (macOS, Windows, Linux)
- Seek anywhere in a transcoded track. Clicking ahead of the part of a transcode that had already arrived used to restart the track or stop at the edge. Lagu now restarts the conversion from the point you asked for, and the scrubber holds still while it does.
- If a stream fails mid song, Lagu picks up a couple of seconds before the failure rather than from 0:00.
iPhone and iPad
- Radial joins the visualizer list. Long press the artwork, or Settings, Appearance, Choose Visualizer. Double tap for fullscreen, where it gets the glow and twice the detail.
Apple TV and Android TV
- Fullscreen visualizers. The framed square is gone. Fullscreen is now an edge to edge stage: a bloom of the album's colours that breathes with the bass and swells on the beat without ever strobing, Spectrum redrawn in the record's colours with a mirrored lower half and falling peak caps, the new Radial, and a now playing lockup in the corner with the art, title, artist, album and a progress line. Everything holds still when you pause.
- Drive it from the remote. Up cycles the mode, Down opens lyrics, Left and Right seek, Back leaves. A one line hint shows for a few seconds on entry, with a switch for it in Settings under Playback.
- Pick a mode without cycling. Hold Select on the visualizer pill in Now Playing for the full list. "Off" keeps the bloom and the lockup with nothing drawn over them.
- Android TV remotes with no play and pause key. On a remote like the Onn's, Select now plays and pauses in fullscreen, and holding Select opens an on screen row of previous, play and pause, next, mode and lyrics.
Android phone
- One "Play on" sheet. A single cast button in Now Playing, the mini player and the tablet bar opens one sheet with your Lagu devices, this phone, and network speakers. The separate Audio Output menu item is gone.
Android Auto
- Playlists in the car. Playlists are browsable from the head unit, with Play All and Shuffle rows at the top, and every row in a long playlist is playable.
- The Queue shows Up Next, with the playing row highlighted, and a tap jumps to that track.
- The car follows your library choices. Libraries you have switched off stay off in the car, and changing the selection updates the head unit without a restart.
- Stations have their own glyph, and so does Shuffle Library.
Fixed
All platforms
- Autoplay went silent after a full album but worked after a single. An album's nearest sounding tracks are mostly its own, which Lagu had already excluded, so it concluded there was nothing left to play. It now looks further afield before giving up.
- Lagu Remote hosts shrug off a flood of idle connections. A burst of half open connections could make a host unanswerable to your own paired phone. Every host now limits them per address and drops the oldest first.
- A refused queue move over Lagu Remote now reports an error instead of pretending it worked.
Desktop
- Spectrum jittered on high refresh displays. On a 120 or 144 Hz panel the bars were smoothed about half as much as they should have been. They now move the same on any display.
- Radial pumped through quiet passages. A soft intro could fire the beat pulse several times a second. Beat detection now listens the way the phone apps do.
- Now Playing flashed toward white on bright album art. The colour wash was tuned for dark covers. It now eases off as the artwork gets brighter, and dark covers look exactly as they did.
- The blurred artwork behind the fullscreen visualizer was never visible. It was being drawn underneath the backdrop.
- Scrubbing back through a transcoded track could restart it from 0:00 and drop to a lower quality while the quality chip went blank.
- Replaying an album from Recently Played did not move it to the front, and could list it twice.
- The Downloads list stops retrying a write that cannot succeed, and tells you on the Downloads screen instead.
- Network speakers on a computer with several network adapters are recognised as local again.
- Pairing the same phone twice no longer leaves duplicate rows in the paired list.
iPhone and iPad
- Dropping a row in Up Next could stack two rows on top of each other. Rows now slide into place, and the order you dropped holds while a remote computer catches up.
- The Remote sheet's confirmation dialogs pointed at the wrong row, and at half height would not open at all, leaving the connection on a spinner.
- Closing the Play on picker while it was still connecting could leave the connection stuck until you relaunched the app.
- Downloads ride out a patch of bad signal again instead of failing on a short cellular stall.
- A queue restored on a transcoded track resumes where you left it without buffering from the start of the song first.
- A problem loading the next track no longer interrupts the one that is playing. (iPhone, Apple TV and Apple Watch.)
- A transcode of the next track that the server cut short is fetched again rather than played short. (iPhone and Apple TV.)
Apple TV
- Play and pause could pause but not resume inside the fullscreen visualizer, fullscreen lyrics, Up Next and the other full screen panels.
- Reconnecting to the same server on a different address keeps your queue, as iPhone already did.
Apple Watch
- Play spun for ever on a remote server with a quality cap set. The watch fell back to the full lossless file, which never fills a buffer over a relayed connection. It now keeps the capped stream, and if a track truly cannot start it says why instead of spinning.
- Music played directly from the watch now shows up as a Lagu session on your Plex server.
Android phone
- Tapping a track could pause it half a second later. Anything that touched the player while a new track was still buffering, such as a station refill, Smart Fades arming, or a shuffle or repeat toggle, could cancel the play you had just asked for. A real pause is untouched.
- With wired headphones, tapping a track further down the queue kept pausing it.
- The notification and lock screen stayed on an old track.
- Next on the last track of an album did nothing, even with Autoplay on. It now rolls into Autoplay.
- Up Next reordering and Remove did nothing while controlling another Lagu device, and past 200 rows Remove could take out the wrong song.
- A network speaker could not be used with a remote server even after the relay arrived, because of how Lagu remembered the server between launches.
- Tapping a speaker with an empty queue no longer wedges the row, and "No network speakers found" waits for the scan to actually finish.
- No more volume slider that does nothing. While casting to a network speaker or controlling another Lagu device, the volume keys show a short note that volume control is coming, instead of a slider that changed nothing.
Android TV
- Skipping through an album piled up conversion jobs on your Plex server. Ten presses of Next through a lossless album could leave nine conversions running. Everything outside the current and next track is now stopped straight away.
- A lossy track under your quality cap failed partway through, every time. A 128 kbps MP3 under a 320 cap is sent untouched, and Lagu mistook the smaller file for a transfer that had been cut short.
- A queue edit made during a crossfade could be lost if the fade was cancelled.
- Spectrum ran slower than Radial in fullscreen.
- The microphone hint clears once you are on a visualizer that does not need it.
Android Auto
- A very large playlist froze the phone. Playing a playlist of around 28,000 tracks from the head unit locked the app up. Playlists now load 200 tracks at a time and fetch the next page as you approach the end, in the car and on the phone.
- Now Playing on the head unit could show the wrong track, or read "playing" while paused.
- The highlighted Queue row no longer drifts in a long queue when crossfade is on.
- The car connects after an offline launch or a server switch, where it could previously come up empty.
- The Downloads tab updates when a download finishes.
- An album cover from the wrong server could show after switching servers.
Known limits
Volume for a network speaker is still set on the speaker itself, and seeking while casting to one is not there yet; both are planned for 0.14.2. On Android, the volume keys do not yet change the computer's volume while you control it over Lagu Remote, as they do on iPhone, which is also 0.14.2. Android Auto has now had a long pass on the desktop head unit but still requires more testing in a real car, so if something is off in yours please let me know.
