Psychotoxical-psysonic/WHATS_NEW.md

What's New

User-facing release highlights for the in-app What's New screen. Maintainers refresh the current line before promoting to next / release. Technical details and PR credits stay in CHANGELOG.md.

Within each section, order by user impact (most noticeable first) — not PR merge order. CHANGELOG.md keeps strict PR order inside Added / Changed / Fixed.

[1.48.0]

Highlights

Offline listening

• When the server is unreachable, browse and detail pages show what you already have locally instead of empty errors — albums, artists, playlists, and cross-server favorites.
• Starred tracks, pinned albums, and playlists live under one media folder; browse them in Offline Library and see disk usage at a glance.
• Favorites auto-sync keeps loved songs on disk; pinned albums and playlists refresh when the library index updates.

Music Network — scrobble beyond Last.fm

• Settings → Integrations now hosts a Music Network: connect Last.fm, Libre.fm, ListenBrainz, Maloja, Rocksky, Koito, or your own GNU FM instance — and scrobble to several at once.
• Pick a primary service for loved tracks, similar artists, and stats; other connections still receive scrobbles. Your existing Last.fm setup migrates automatically.
• A master switch turns the whole network on or off.

Theme Store

• Browse and install community themes from Settings → Themes — search, dark/light filter, full-size previews, and sort by popularity or date.
• Six palettes ship with the app; everything else installs on demand and works offline after the first download.
• Now Playing follows every theme cleanly, including light palettes.
• Import a theme from a local .zip when you have a package from a friend or your own design.
• The sidebar nudges you when an installed theme has an update; one-click update from the theme card.

Fullscreen player

• Rebuilt for much lower CPU and memory use: a calm, sharp fullscreen view with album art, waveform seekbar, up-next queue, synced lyrics, ratings, and a clock that follows your Clock format setting.
• The song title no longer shows a leading track number, and descenders (g, j, p, q, y) are no longer clipped.

Live — richer now playing on Navidrome 0.62+

• On servers with OpenSubsonic playbackReport (Navidrome ≥ 0.62), Live shows who is playing or paused, how far into the track they are, and playback speed when another client sends it — with smooth position updates between refreshes.

Queue — Timeline mode

• A third queue layout keeps the current track in the middle with history above and up next below — great for long listening sessions. Cycle the header control or pick it in Settings → Personalisation → Queue display.

Settings → Servers

• Each card shows the server software and version (e.g. Navidrome 0.62.0) under the name, with a cleaner two-line layout and compact actions.
• Navidrome 0.62+ shows a green AudioMuse-AI badge when the plugin is detected — no manual toggle on current Navidrome.

Sidebar — pin Now Playing to the top

• New Settings → Sidebar toggle moves Now Playing to the top of the sidebar instead of the bottom (off by default).

Startup

• A themed loading splash appears while the app starts — colours follow your active theme, including community palettes.

What's New page

• Highlights like this list load from the release on startup (and cache for offline). A Full changelog tab on the same page holds the technical detail.

Improved

• Audio decoding runs on Symphonia 0.6; streams start sooner and recover from stalls without restarting the player.
• The Preload Next Track toggle under Settings → Storage → Buffering is gone — playback no longer waits on that extra RAM prefetch. Gapless, crossfade, and Hot Cache behave as before.

Fixed

Playback and audio

• Windows: the app no longer keeps the audio device open while idle, so the system can sleep when music is not playing.
• macOS: steady playback stutter from background device polling is gone on the default output path.
• After a long pause, the seekbar shows the saved position immediately and the next Play resumes without an audible blip at track start.
• Stop keeps the real waveform on the seekbar instead of falling back to flat bars.

Offline, Now Playing, and Navidrome

• Now Playing cards (from this album, discography, most played) stay populated during cached and offline playback instead of blanking out on track change.
• Navidrome Show in Now Playing and play-count scrobbles work when audio plays from hot cache, offline pins, or auto-synced favorites.
• Mixed-server queues still report to the correct Navidrome server.

Themes and integrations

• Favoriting from the player bar, fullscreen player, or shortcuts updates the star in track lists and playlists immediately.
• Discord Rich Presence shows album art again when covers come from the server.
• Focus rings and dropdown borders follow the active theme consistently.

Browse and library

• Tracks tagged with several genres in one field (e.g. Metal/Ambient/Experimental) match each genre again in browse, filters, and search.
• All Albums → Only compilations returns results for common tagging patterns.
• Album grids show the album artist on compilations instead of a random track artist.
• Song rails (Random Picks, Discover Songs, etc.) link each name in multi-artist credits separately.
• Artist → Top Tracks play works even when the artist page has no albums loaded yet.
• Home → Most Played no longer jumps the page when you load more albums.
• Mainstage hero backdrop stays in sync when you skip albums quickly.

Other

• Linux: the curl | bash auto-installer works again.
• Linux: internet radio no longer appears twice in the desktop now-playing overlay.
• The active server card under Settings → Servers draws a complete border on all sides.

Under the hood

• Navidrome 0.62+ auto-detects AudioMuse-AI and routes Instant Mix / Lucky Mix through the smarter API when the plugin is present — older Navidrome keeps the manual toggle you already know.
• Future release highlights can refresh on the What's New page without waiting for a full app update download.