Redesign Beta Discussion

[Chaphasilor]

Please leave any feedback you have about the beta below!

There will be just this one discussion for all beta releases, so ideally comment which beta version your comment refers to!

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The discussion is offered as an alternative to joining the Discord Server. Discord is the preferred way to discuss the beta, as it offers us more flexibility and easier communication, but we know that not everyone wants to create an account :)

[pinsarda]

First of all kudoos to all the contributors for the release, it's a major improvement over last version. I am looking forward to the fixes and improvements that will make this app on paar with regular streaming services. I really appreciate all the work that went into this !
After a day or so of use, I have early feedback to give. I warn you, there's a lot of nitpicking (especially UI/UX wise) and some issues are subjective, I know it's not as easy to fix as it sounds. As I said I am really thankful to all the contributors, please don't take my criticism as complaints. I suppose some issues are already open for my points, but I wanted to give my overall impressions with the beta so you have a rough idea of the things that are the most noticeable to a tester.

Now here are my thoughts (beta 0.9.2) :

What's perfect :

• Download system, it just works
• Offline mode, greyed out tracks and artist caching is the exact behaviour I expect
• The UX of the new queuing system
• Queue restoring
• New login screen

What feels a bit of a downgrade :

• I personally miss the covers going to the edge of the screen, I think it would look better if they were a bit bigger in the player view
• I can't skip with swipe gestures anymore

UI/UX issues :

• Too often there's bad contrast on the now playing bar and in the queue (especially in bright mode)
• I thought several times that some of my albums were not favorited because of the difference between big red hearts in the list, and just plain hearts in top bar or now playing bar. I think the big red hearts are now out of place and confusing (see screenshots)

• In addition they almost overlap with the letters search bar in a weird way (see screenshots)

• While the new search by letter is a nice feature, it fels very janky to load all albums up to the selected letter
• The letters break the mosaic view
• It's also possible to have overlapping in the queue (see screenshots)

• The placeholder image for artists doesn't look very good imo
• When you load an artist with no songs or album it should display a message and not leave everything blank (see screenshots)

Bugs :

• I've had many crashes when interacting with the new queuing system on large playlists (~200 songs). I think it's worse when in shuffling mode, or if you move very fast in the menus, or skip many songs at once
• Overall choppy experience on the player view (on a decent phone, pixel 6a) I don't know what causes stutters but it looks to me like blurring the album covers is not as optimised as it should be or that debug mode is somehow active
• When I skip a song at the end of a playlist while in song-looping mode it resets the progress bar but doesn't restart the music

Nice to have that are missing (I know it's either planned or not a priority) :

• Lyrics (when Jellyfin 10.9 will land)
• Redesigned home screen
• Landscape mode for tablets
• Sync play with other clients (control playback of my pc from the phone)

I think this is everything I hope to see improved at some point, I didn't notice anything else for now.
Also let me know when we'll be able to make new translations, I'd be glad to help !

[UnicornsOnLSD]

Thanks for the detailed feedback!

Contrast is something that we've been fighting with ever since it was implemented, we can have a play with the contrast on light mode to make stuff more readable.

I believe that jump-to-letter was added in as "this could be cleaned up a bit, but it's good enough for a beta", I'm assuming it should be disabled in the grid view?

Queueing issues would be @Chaphasilor 's domain, I can't speak much on that.

Blurs in Flutter are really weird, I know that there's an issue on iOS where opening the queue can cause the framerate to drop to around 30fps, which is obviously unacceptable. It's something that I want to look into personally.

[Chaphasilor]

Thanks for the write-up @pinsarda!
Firstly, thanks for the kind words about the "perfect" features!

• I'll try to make the cover bigger, but it's hard to do without breaking the layout on small screens. There have been multiple requests for it though
• I didn't know swipe-to-skip was possible in the stable version! I would like to add that, probably when I improve the swipe-to-skip on the mini player / now playing bar
• Regarding the contrast, it's hard to pull off. I want to make it work though! It will probably require adapting the text color based on the accent color
• Yeah the red hearts will be changed. It will look more like it does on the Playback History screen, although that's more of a rough draft at this point. The song list items will be redesigned soon.
• Search by letter is experimental, I'm not too happy with it myself. My library is too large to properly use it anyway. I'll try to give the grid view a bit more love soon. I'm not sure in what way the view is broken by the letters though? They overlap, but the layout looks fine for me 🤔
• I'm aware of the queue overlap, it's been a while since I implemented that and handling the transparency is a bit complicated. I'll see if I can fix that, but it doesn't have high priority right now
• I'm planning to "design" new placeholders for artists and album covers, not sure when that will happen though
• The proper empty states for artists are a good point. It's also missing a loading indicator. The artists screen hasn't been properly redesigned yet anyway, there's still a lot of work to be done!
• I'm not sure what exactly you're doing when skipping past the end in the playlist. Do you expect playback to start after skipping, even if it was paused before? If the song is still playing, and I skip forward to the start of the playlists/queue due to loop all, the first song starts playing for me...
• Home screen is a high priority, but requires some plumbing to get all of the data we want to show
• I'd love to add sync play, but it's rather complicated. I'm planning to start with restoring queues from the server to support switching between clients semi-seamlessly. What do you think?

I'm especially interested in the reported crashes involving the queue. Could you try to give some instructions on how to reproduce this, possibly with a screen recording? I've never experienced a crash related to queueing myself, not even when adding a whole artist with 600 songs to the queue...

Again, thanks for taking the time to write all of this down!

[pinsarda]

I am glad to see everything I raised is taken into account, I don't have much to add to all that, I am sure it will be gradually fixed as the redesign goes on, and for most of the issues it's only a minor concern.

Nailing contrast seems indeed very difficult to achieve, but I think it's important for accessibility. I hope you'll get it to work one way or another.

The easy fix when using grid view would be to disable jump-to-letter altogether indeed. While still usable it looks very weird for now. It's a neat idea but unusable for my large library too.

By the way, as @Chaphasilor wrote about small screens, I tested the beta on my 7 years old low end samsung phone, and it runs much better than I expected. Honestly pretty impressed by the usability. However I feel like that there's still a lot of unused space on the player that would be useful on this small screen, and I feel the same when used on my main phone. All the layout is right but it looks like the cover should be bigger on both, with the song title a bit closer to the playing bar. To me it should be like the little mockup here rather than the first screenshot :

For the end of playlist thing, I am not sure what the good behaviour would be, but now it's clearly a bug. When I play the last song of a playlist in loop (not looping on the playlist, but the song itself) and skip, the progress bar resets, but the song keeps playing as if nothing happened. The same goes for the last song of an album.
You could either make it start from the beginning of the song, or start the first song of the playlist, or do nothing but not reset the progress bar. (I think the second or third option are more coherent with the rest of the system).

What you propose would be a good first step for sync play, but I would not use that much. "Real" remote control is one of the few things I miss from spotify, it was useful at times. But I got used not having the feature, and I imagine it's something hard to implement with a lot of edgecases, and server limitations.

I will try to get footage of the crashes. It happens regularly, always after having used the app for a while. But I can't reproduce it reliably, and weirdly I get them less and less in regular use. It didn't happen on my old phone despite my best efforts, so after some tests I think it is related to battery optimisation. I guess when enabled they clear something in memory that otherwise pile up and crashes the app. I'll keep you updated but the app didn't crash since I enabled the optimisations back. It also runs much better than before for an unknown reason, I have no idea of what happened. I'll tinker a bit and let you know.

[Chaphasilor]

You can disable the fast scroller in settings. I might change the toggle to a ternary selector, so that the default is "only shown in list view" or something similar.

Regarding the layout and cover size, I've done a few additional iterations that should be even more tolerant against small screens, while emphazising the cover more on large screens. It will land with the next update.

Thanks for clarifying the loop stuff, I wasn't aware you were in "loop one" mode. I'll try to see what the culprit is, but it would be helpful if you could create a separate issue for it!

You could also create an issue for the sync play / remote control feature, so that we can discuss the details there :)

[pinsarda]

Oh I didn't know it was such an easy workaround, thanks. I'll wait the next release then !
I just opened two new issues :)

[Krafting]

Hello, I've tried just a tiny bit the new redesign and it is awesome, bringing Jellyfin music player to 2024 standards!

I only found two things that annoy me:

• Can't swipe next/previous, I use this in my car instead of having to look at the phone to click the small next button (Bonus point if you add them as one-to-one gestures, like on Stellio Player)

• We can't swipe up or down the Letters in the right of the playlist/song/artist/album page, would be cool if we could swipe on the letter, and jump directly to it. Just like in Fintunes, but with added feedback with a letter at the center of the screen. Or like in Auxio, the letter is only shown to the current finger position.

If it wasn't clear enough, I can take pictures or video next week!

Thank you for being this awesome project ❤️

[Chaphasilor]

Hi, thanks for the feedback! The ability to swipe on the letters has already been requested, so I'll see what I can do about it.

Could you please elaborate what you mean by "one-to-one gestures"? Swiping the cover to skip back and forth is definitely planned!

[lukaslindnermusic]

[beta 0.9.3 on iOS 17.3.1 using an iPhone 14 Pro]
[Jellyfin 10.8.13 Docker on Synology DS920+]

First of all, very great work with the Redesign so far! I really really like it.
ABSOLUTELY AMAZING that you could include artists images in such an elegant way even in the player view!
I really like it... Finamp in general! I am a huge fan <3 👍

Here is a list of my first few observations/suggestions/things I want to mention regarding the Redesign but also in general:

When I am in Offline-Mode, the Artists Tab shows all Artists, when I disable Offline-Mode, it only shows the Album Artists as in previous versions.
I already commented on a issue regarding this that is mapped to the "ToDo" list on the Redesign-Project, but just for reference here:
A separate view for Album Artists and Artists would be perfect! PLEASE keep a separate view of Album Artists, as there are a lot of use-cases for it (besides the obvious one with featured artists). For example, with a Recording of a Musical, normally, every singer is listed as an artist on the tracks that he/she is in, as well as the "Ensemble" (which refers to the whole cast singing together) and the "Orchestra" of the Musical. But I would not say that a singer is the artist of the album. As album artists, I would add the Ensemble as a whole as well as the Composer of the Musical (which technically is not even an artist for the individual tracks). And when I want to search for the Musical, I also would just search for the composer or the musical cast, individual singers clutter the list as they really might add up. Of course, a separate Artists view would be nice too, just to check on which musicals Singer A was a part of.
A similar example would be film scores, where in addition to the composer I would add stuff like the session orchestra as interpet to tracks in some cases. But the only album artist would be the film composer, and if I search for a film score, I would never come to the idea to search for the orchestra instead of the film composer. The film soundtrack is the work of the composer, therefore it should be the only album artist. However, it would be nice to see which orchestra played on which film scores, so a separate artists view that lists all artists would be nice. Basically, the way Jellyfin Web does it is awesome!

Maybe this sounds stupid, but as much as I like the feature to remember the queue: How can I remove the "Play now" so that the mini-player disappears?
I know, it might be technically unnecessary, but it was a tick for me to somehow clear it :P

As much as I like the feature to restore "Now Playing" queues: How long do they get stored? Can I delete them manually somehow? Maybe by a swipe-action or something?

Some people already mentioned this: I would love to be able to see metadata stuff like file type, sample rate, bitrate,...
But maybe as an optional setting that is disabled by default? and when enabled, maybe just add a little "i" or some other small icon on the player screen and only show the file infos when clicking on it. I think, too much info displayed by default would clutter the otherwise very straightforward clean UI.

It is nice that you can see the playing count on the viewer, but maybe add an option to disable it, just in case someone doesn't care about it... so that it is more customizable.

What about an option to filter for already downloaded tracks/albums/playlists/artists when offline mode is disabled?
Or the other way around, filter them out to only scroll through NOT-downloaded items to check what else you want to download.

I know this one is not directly related to the Redesign, absolutely up for general discussion and most use-cases and users wouldn't even think of it and don't mind it, and I am totally fine if you ignore this point all the way as it really is not that important...
As a professional (film) composer and musician I am triggered by Spotify and Co. already for calling it "Songs". Technically, a "Song" refers only to a track that has vocals in it, so a recording of a classical symphony, a instrumental jazz standard, a film score etc. would not get called a "Song". I think, "Track(s)" is a way better name as it is more generic and can refer to both vocal tracks and instrumental tracks.

So far my first impressions. I will keep using the beta now and if I notice other things I will let you know 😊
Please keep up the amazing work!!! <3
Looking forward to the stable release of the redesign! 😊

[Chaphasilor]

Hi, sorry for not responding earlier, I seem to have missed it...

Firstly, thanks for the feedback. Really glad that you enjoy the artist images!

1. A way to differentiate between artists and album artists was already requested and is planned, but probably not as a separate tab. But the library browser will be redesigned anyway, so I have no idea yet how it will end up being implemented...

2. Clearing the queue isn't possible yet, but was also requested. Your comment actually gave me the idea to use a swipe-down gesture on the now playing bar to dismiss it and stop playback + clear the queue. There will also be a button for that somewhere in the queue panel, I guess.

3. They are not stored indefinitely

4. The metadata display will be customizable (so that you can choose what info is displayed, and in what order), but I probably won't collapse it into an "i" button. Maybe down the road.
   Because the metadata list is scrollable just like the artists, it shouldn't clutter the screen too much.

5. Currently, the last 60 queues are saved, with no way to delete them. But I'm planning to extend the "restore queue" feature into an actual "multi-queue" feature soon, and that should be able to offer more options, like removing a queue.

6. That filter makes sense, but tbh I have no idea how I should integrate that. I'll see if I can fit it into the new design somehow...

7. We actually use "track" internally to refer to things, and "songs" just for user-facing stuff. That was mostly to stay consistent with other streaming apps. I don't think there's a big argument against using "tracks" instead though, so I'll see what I can do.
   It would also be a better fit for podcasts and audio books :)

[lukaslindnermusic]

Hi 😊
No Problem. Thank you for your answer 👍

1. A suggestion: If you don't want or can add a separate list view, maybe you could implement a filter in the artists list view to either show artists, album artists or both? (This setting best should be remembered by the app)?
   But however it might be possible to implement this... I think it is more important to have a clear and congruent way to handle the single artist views. Currently, there is a bug where with Artists that do NOT have entire albums on their own (they are artists but not album artists), in Online Mode their artist view is empty, in Offline Mode it lists all the albums they are part of but it does so as if they were the album artist... with all the tracks in the count, even if they just did a solo on one of the tracks.
   The way Jellyfin Web itself handles this is by listing albums under "Appears On" if an artist is only an artist at one or more tracks but NOT an album artist. And every album where they are tagged as album artist is in the normal Albums List.
   If you don't set the tag for album artists with your audio files, Jellyfin just takes all the artists from the tracks within the album and displays them as album artists, but I don't know if it does it in that way only for the user-facing stuff of Jellyfin Web or also for the API.
   (Unfortunately, I'm currently not (yet) familiar with the Jellyfin API nor Flutter or Dart, but I'm planning on getting to know Dart + Flutter in the next few months.)

2. You are absolutely right!!! Harry Potter 2 Chapter 5 Track 2 by Stephen Fry, what an awesome song, probably my favorite song at the moment!!! :P

[Chaphasilor]

Adding support for the "appears on" section is definitely planned, I've requested it myself (#572)

[TinDefacto]

[beta 0.9.3 on iOS 16.6.1 using an iPhone 12 Pro]
Hi all! As everyone has said, this is amazing and I really really appreciate all of the hard work that's gone into this!

I'll try to keep my feedback short!

Bug:

• The scrobbling has been acting a bit strange for me so far -- when I'm listening to an album, most songs will scrobble twice: once at the beginning, and once at the end. (I haven't noticed any missed scrobbles yet at least!)

Requests/suggestions:

• I second the request for a large (i.e. to the ends of the screen) display of the album artwork.
• Would there be a way to add an option to keep artist images cropped as squares, as is default in the stable version?
• Is there a way to hide the "top songs" in the artist view? I only listen to albums, so the "top songs" feature isn't very relevant for me.
• In the album view, the "play" and "shuffle" buttons feel very large and take up a lot of space. Perhaps they could be the same size as the displayed artist at the top?
• When displaying the list of artists, the entries feel too spread out -- i.e. it feels like there's too much space between each one.
• In the longer term, it'd be really neat to grab the "play count" when playing a song from last.fm instead of Jellyfin, but that'd just be a kinda cool thing and absolutely not a big priority at all. :)

Anyway, these are just my thoughts; it looks fantastic and I'm so excited it's finally (just about) come!! Thank you all again!

[Chaphasilor]

Interesting, I'll see what I can do about the cropping.

The wrong playback reporting is worrying. At least it's consistent between JF and last.fm...
Maybe the audio player on iOS behaves slightly different than the one on Android, which would explain the behavior. It seems like when a tracks starts playing, it is reported as started, then stopped, and then started again.

Since you're on iOS I sadly can't send you a version for testing, so you'll have to report if the lastest changes coming with the next update improve things.
On Android playback reporting is now rock-solid in 99% of cases, and I'd like to also see that on iOS!

[TinDefacto]

Thank you so much for looking into it!!

Also, one other thing I've noticed is that the search function seems to take much longer (several seconds), and upon opening the app it often will tell me "An error has occurred". You're probably already on those but just letting you know. :)

[TinDefacto]

Update: the new version (0.9.4 -- just now saw there's an even newer one) has been scrobbling beautifully, and the bigger artwork is awesome. :) The long search times and errors upon boot-up are still there, but only a mild annoyance!

One quick thing: as for the album artwork, would it be possible to not have the rounded corners? Keeping them square would be truer to the artists' intentions!

Thank you again so so much!!

[Chaphasilor]

Hey, thanks for the update! Good to hear it's scrobbling correctly now.

As for the rounded album cover, I could add an option that controlls the corner radius.

But I feel like that kind of invidates your request for cropping the artist images. Some people might want to have non-round and non-square images there too. Some people even use non-square album covers (which I didn't know was possible until very recently).
Do you think this should be customizable as well? I prefer round artist images myself, but would like to avoid too much customization, because it's hard to maintain.

[Chaphasilor]

@TinDefacto just to get back to you, if you tap the album image in the track menu, the album will be shown in fullscreen without rounded corners

[djohnson1865]

Hey everyone, not to keep getting redundant, but want to start off saying kudos on the new beta! The work by everyone involved has obviously been fantastic and the feature changes/updates have taken Finamp from being A tier to S tier. Thus far I have had extremely positive results with all of the changes and have had zero stability issues on Android 14 on my OnePlus 8. Zero crashes of any kind. Downloading appears to be much more performant/stable and the queuing system is a much welcome addition.

I went through the app and tested everything and had some feedback I wrote out initially after release and haven't had the time to come and actually post it publicly.

I'll break down my feedback based on the sections of the app, if any of this has already been mentioned or discussed feel free to ignore. I attempted to read through the history/issues, but may have missed a discussion point.

• Playback Screen
  • Going to agree with others the full width would be nice, but I personally have no real skin in that game. If it stayed as it is I'd be happy
  • Album art feels like it should be clickable and/or have gesture support of some sort. Maybe tap to pause/play. Seems like this may have been a feature before based on some other feedback? If so I don't remember, but it makes a large portion of the screen uninteractable. For those of us without any sort of Android Auto/Carplay support, it makes the ability to play/pause while driving on a phone mount very easy.
  • The redundant album info makes it feel a little cluttered, i.e. at the top saying "Playing From Album: ..." with also having the album name displayed below the artist name at the bottom doesn't feel necessary. I wonder if removing the bottom label, it may free up some space to not break spacing on smaller phones with full width album art as @Chaphasilor mentioned previously.
  • Q: What is the bottom right button on the queue menu? I find it unclear (I may be being a dunce)
• List overview (Home?)
  • Sounds like there is still a bit of pending work on this so apologies if my feedback is redundant
  • Inconsistent sizing
    • Artists/Genres have much wider spacing than Albums/Playlists in list view
    • Label is top justified on Artists/Genres which feels odd with no second line of text I would imagine centering when no subtext is required would make sense
  • Quick/Letter scroll
    • Doesn't appear to work correctly for me on the artists/genres view. Albums works perfectly, artists is always wrong, which I believe is due to the sizing issue mentioned previously. Seems like the jump is calculated based on the Album list sizing, and the Artists being different breaks the scroll distance calculation.
    • Feels like it should be hidden on performing a search as the results are not alphabetical so the alphabetical scroll doesn't make much sense. Currently you search and have the quick scroll there with no actual usability.
• Artist View
  • In my opinion the Top Songs, though a cool feature, should be a toggle in settings. I like the idea of it, but it makes the flow of artist -> album -> song slightly less convenient for those of us who generally play albums and aren't typically looking to play individual songs.

If any clarification on points are needed, or someone would like screenshots let me know.

After several weeks of use I'm exceedingly happy with the update. Stability has been great, and so many quality of life features have already made daily use of Finamp just that little bit more awesome. Thanks again all!

[Chaphasilor]

Hey, thanks for the feedback! You made some valid points, but not all changes are feasible (in the near future).

• Tapping the cover to play/pause seems like a nice idea. Will probably add that when I get around to adding swiping on the cover to skip back and forth
• There will probably be some kind of customization on the player screen in the future, but I'm not sure what. The queue source (at the top) isn't limited to albums, and can change for individual tracks (e.g. added to next up).
• The button on the queue panel will scroll back to the current track, in case you scrolled up or down a lot. I haven't yet figured out how to only make it appear if the current track is not visible
• Spacing issue for artists is known, and the albums count should be shown as well afaik. Probably got removed by accident. The fast scroller not working because of a different item height is a very good explanation. I've also been annoyed by that in the past, but couldn't figure out what the problem was...
• Hiding the fast scroller when searching is a good idea
• Top songs will likely not be customizable, but the overall design of the artist screen will be changed eventually. Since, as you mentioned, it is only a slight inconvenience to some, but useful to others, I hope that's fine.

I'm super busy with uni at the moment, so most of these changes will not happen until late April...

[Ammoton]

First, the redesign beta is awesome, and I want to say thanks to all the contributors who made it possible.
There are only 2 things that haven't been mentioned yet and 1 suggestion.

1. The heart symbol is smaller than the play/pause symbol.

2. The artist image is not cached (the artist image is loaded later than the rest).

2.mp4

3. A suggestion for the Jump to Letter feature (This is what Samsung Music does).

3.mp4

[Chaphasilor]

Thanks for the feedback. I'll double-check the icon, I think the heart icon is coming from a component, that's why it's not consistent with the rest.

Artist images are indeed not cached, and I'd like to improve image loading eventually also for the non-player menu. However, this is currently not a priority, so I'm not sure when I'll get there myself...

There were a few similar suggestions about the fast scroller, but it's not so simple when the data needs to be fetched from the server first. But improvements are definitely coming there!

[snppls]

Just wanted to give a huge shout out and thanks for the latest update (0.9.4)! Really loving the subtle improvements and the larger album cover sizes. Also, it's so smooth to add songs to playlists now! Unfortunately there seems to be a pretty massive bug (on IOS at least) as the app crashes roughly 90% of the time whenever I choose a song to play. The only way to prevent this is to add the song to the queue and play it from there. I have raised a bug report with more detail.

[ldexterldesign]

👋

Hope you're well

Thanks for software, and giving me access to local music on my iPhone again!

• As a user, when I'm navigating albums/artists/playlists/genres/songs, I want an easier way to download items (e.g. button to download all artists); even better a button to download a whole library, download all likes/loves etc.
• As a user I want offline mode to not exist in the user experience - show me all (cached) content regardless whether I'm online/offline and always differentiate between content downloaded or not (e.g. unplayable content is opacity:50% until it's playable when it's opacity:100%)
• As a user I want a way to delete all downloads without having to uninstall the app
• As a user I want a way to reset all settings to default
• As a user, when I go online, I want a way to always keep the downloads I've specified in sync (i.e. so I don't have to babysit them manually) (e.g. download all likes/loves)

If you're reading and:

• agree then please vote up (e.g. +1, like), or;
• disagree then please vote down (e.g. -1, dislike) - I'd love to know why?

If I should create a separate (feature request) issue for anything here then please let me know

Hope this helps and requests are considered

Sincerely

[Chaphasilor]

Hi! Thanks for the feedback. Some of the functionality you requested is already there:

• You can download your entire library (from the sidebar)
• You can download all favorites (it's currently in the Downloads settings, but that will be redesigned in the future)
• Your downloads will also be kept synchronized automatically, new items will be downloaded and removed ones will be deleted
• You can (and have always been able to) delete downloads, from the downloads screen (accessible through the sidebar)

So what's still left would be:

• Reset settings to default: it's planned, but doesn't have a high priority
• Hybrid online/offline mode: That would be a major change and hard to implement. Finamp already uses downloaded tracks and images even in online mode, and does show items that aren't downloaded with reduced opacity in offline mode. What you're suggesting would be downloading the metadata for an entire library, and use that if the server can't be reached. Theoretically possible, but not something that's currently planned. Also, it is hard to keep everything consistent between what the server returns in online mode and what is used in offline mode, and having these inconsistencies for no apparent reason without explicitly switching to offline mode might be confusing.

But I do agree that the offline mode experience could be improved!

[lellobello501]

In the original version I use the server behind a basicauth password defined in caddy2 and Finamp accepts the format of the following server url:

https://user:pass@jellyfin.domain.com

the current beta 0.95 instead does not recognise the server behind a basicauth authentication.

Is this something that can be reinstated?

Thanks for the amazing app.

[Chaphasilor]

It worked before? Interesting!
There's #1086, but I didn't know it worked on the stable version...

[TheFallenSpirit]

@Chaphasilor can we get an updated Discord invite? The one listed is expired. Thanks!

[Chaphasilor]

Hey, the one from recent updates should already be updated. Just the one from the 0.9.2-0.9.4 releases expired. Here's the link:
https://discord.gg/hHtyzqdgaX

If that one also doesn't work, let me know!

[crypticC0der]

hi the discord link seems to have expired
overall I'm happy with the app but one thing, the playlists don't seem to work properly?

[kazango]

Found 2 bugs with the Finamp beta today after adding lyrics to my catalog and messing around with offline mode, after looking through the issues tab found other people with the same issues and fixes already in place for the next update. You guys are doing amazing work!

One thing that is bugging me that I haven't looked for though, In previous versions (I'm not sure if pre or post-beta), every song/track had a heart in the list if it was in my favorites. This is now not the case and leading me to double-take and double-check if I have the favorites filter enabled each time I start up the app. Any chance we can we get those hearts back in the tracks lists?

[Chaphasilor]

Hearts should be there! Does it work for you now?

[michaelcresswell]

I am using Finamp beta 0.9.9. The redesigned ‘Tracks’ section is much nicer to use and works well. However, the song that Finamp picks to play after it has completed playing my selection doesn’t make sense to me. It’s not from the search results list or another song from the artist or album of the song I chose. How does Finamp decide the next song?

[Chaphasilor]

By default, Finamp starts a Jellyfin "Instant Mix". It should also be shown at the top of the player screen and in the queue panel, where it says "<track name - Mix".
You can toggle the behavior in the Interaction settings, with the alternative behavior being the old one where only that track is played, and then playback stops.

We should probably show a small toast message that makes this clearer though.

Jellyfin's mixes are rather basic though, and I think are only based on genre.

[bugwill]

really hope we have carplay support...

[Uno-Muno]

Generally speaking, I love the redesign, but as an UI designer I noticed couple of places that require some polish and thought.

First of all the queue drawer/modal
The two ice ns for shuffle and repeat have too little white space making them hard to tap. Secondly the name of an artist should be closer to the title in the card, giving it better hierarchy and tying them together. Also whenever the cover photo is not perfectly square there will be small gaps in the seeker thingy and the queue list.

The album/playlist view
It looks unbalanced to have two dropdown buttons (one for each button). I would combine the contents and have one dropdown. Not much would change for user that way, but the view would look much cleaner.

These arey two cents and I didn't usertest anything.

[Chaphasilor]

@Uno-Muno wow I didn't even see your comment here!
The artist/title spacing issue should be fixed since the track list tile redesign, the two menu buttons will be fixed by #1159.
For the shuffle icons, are you talking just about vertical whitespace? Or are they also too close together horizontally?

I'm not sure how we could handle non-square covers. Showing the accent color on the sides would throw off the progress, and I don't want to zoom the covers either...

[hht355]

hello, finamp v0.9.9, scrolling track with alphabet seem laggy
https://photos.app.goo.gl/gvB69LvLJCaY7SfA8

btw I cannot join the discord, it say invite invalid

[Chaphasilor]

Discord link should be working again. The video share has expired I'm afraid, but the scrolling is indeed "laggy" (a tradeoff we haven't gotten around yet)

[Valentino-pucci]

Hi, why can't I see the "lyrics" option? Is this my server problem?

[UnicornsOnLSD]

Do you have lyrics for that song on your server? There's a plugin for this: https://github.com/crobibero/jellyfin-plugin-lrclib

[Chaphasilor]

Hey @Valentino-pucci, I think you've hidden the bottom actions (queue button) in the settings. The setting should probably be renamed, since it also hides the lyrics button. If you want to keep it hidden, you can swipe to the left on the controls section (below the album cover) to go to the lyrics screen :) The gesture only works if lyrics are available.
Hope that helps!

[lpepen-re]

Hello, i created this issue: #891 but im not sure if beta related issues are accepted yet. It appears that on beta release 0.9.10. transcoded downloads are not playing. If i choose to download original track it does play. I downloaded transcoded tracks AFTER installing the beta update. The transcoded downloads were working on the prior release.

My settings are:
Enable Transcoded Downloads: Always
codec: MP3
bitrate: 192kbps (i tried lowering it but same result)

Findroid Finamp: 0.9.10
Jellyfin: 10.9.9
Android: 14

P.S. Thank you so much for this project i am really enjoying it. specially the beta UI updates, can't wait for an official release.

[ilpssun]

As I can't seem to join the discord discussion, I post my info here. I just created #945 to suggest disabling spelling correction for the search field in finamp. Apart from that, it is working fine so far for me – great job, guys!

[Chaphasilor]

Awesome, good to hear! Just replied to that issue. Why can't you join the Discord? Did the link expire or something?

[ilpssun]

Yes, it shows “the link is expired”.

[Chaphasilor]

Ah, did you use the link at the top of this discussion thread? I forgot to update that, I only update the link for the most recent beta releases.
But I've updated the link now, so please try again!

[sasha-id]

Love new app, look and functionality!
Especially the way you can add a song to multiple playlists! 🙌
This feature overlooked in most of the players and important to people (DJs) who constantly organize music on the go and have dozen playlists.

One small suggestion/request:
Add an “Add to Playlist” icon directly on the player screen. This would eliminate the need for an extra click and make the process even smoother. Can be configurable in settings. 🙏

[Chaphasilor]

@sasha-id seems like I never responded? You can just tap the heart-icon on the player screen, that will open the playlist actions menu by default, where you can add a track to any playlist. It will also show the "Favorites" as a target at the top (to allow adding a track to favorites), as well as the current playlist (if you're playing from a playlist right now).
If you long-press the icon it will just toggle the favorite status right-away :)

[rigrig]

Not sure if this should be a new issue, probably related to #289 and #1201:
I set it to download all playlists (+favourites +latest 5 albums), which works great!
Except I also had a playlist with music videos, and those got downloaded as well. I wasn't expecting that, as they were in a different (Music Videos) library.

[rigrig]

As long as the users know that playlists might include items from other libraries, I personally think thats fine

My use case is "Listening music and easily download songs I'm likely to listen to", and I'd be disappointed if "download all playlists + favorites + latest albums" turns out not to be a good solution for that. Individually downloading playlists on all my devices every time I create a new one is definitely more hassle.

To me it sounds like this needs either server-side changes for the filtering and allowing users to select all libraries in Finamp (with a warning for non-music ones), or just accepting that it won't work that way (and maybe adding a warning when selecting to download all playlists).

[Chaphasilor]

@lukaslindnermusic maybe a radical suggestion, but we could use the genre-filter approach for libraries as well, where all item collections are filtered based on the active library by default, but this can be a) temporarily disabled, and b) permanently disabled in settings. Only question would be where to put such a filter chip. Anyway, it's a bit off-topic I guess.

For a slightly different approach, why not have a setting that allows limiting which BaseItemDtoTypes can get downloaded? Options could be "Only tracks", "All items, but only audio", and "Everything". Then the default could be "Only tracks", but people could change that if they want. "All items, but only audio" would transcode the items to only save the audio part.
There could also be an "always ask" option, so that this dropdown is included in the download dialog, meaning that users could override the behavior for e.g. a specific playlist.
What do you think @rigrig @Komodo5197?

[Komodo5197]

I think the current way we handle libraries is fine enough. And we've cut over to filtering artists (and genres?) to the library, so I think things are already more in line with expectations. We never did add that warning for cross library downloads though. I'd lean more towards adding an all libraries option rather than presenting it as a filter, if people want this feature.

The setting seems reasonable enough, although I'd probably make the default all items audio only. I'm not sure how we handle non-tracks either online or offline at the moment, so I don't know how much work it would be to get this working well.

[Chaphasilor]

Alright, both valid suggestions. There are a few open issues regarding other item types (audio books, music videos) that we should probably handle first.

[Chaphasilor]

I've added the warning to the download button in 126a059

[muja]

Hi
First of all, this is really a great app. I am extremely surprised by how well refined it is, even more so than Plexamp.

FYI I'm on 9.20 with Jellyfin 10.11.2, my feedback so far:

• [Bug] When pressing ⏭️ on the Last (or Single) Item in the Queue, the progress slider will jump to the end, however playback will continue from a (seemingly) random position in the track and the position labels will be messed up.
  Here is a screenshot, the track itself is only 5:07 long

  
• [Bug] Sometimes when seeking (or pressing a Lyrics line), the Lyrics will go out of sync
• [Wishlist] Possibility to use a visualizer (similar to Plexamp/original Winamp) instead of the album art -- plus it would be awesome if it'd be possible to have a combined visualizer + Lyrics view
• [Wishlist] interface for correcting Lyrics (could be an option under the track's ≡ menu), sometimes the lyrics are out of sync and Jellyfin API supports uploading lyrics
• I had noticed when going to Tracks and filtering for favorites, then clicking a track it would play a completely random track. Was sure it's a major bug, then I noticed that it launched a Track Mix based on the clicked track (without playing the track first). And recently it plays the Track first, which is weird because the app didn't get an update since the bug occurred? Maybe server-side?

[Chaphasilor]

@muja thanks for kind words and the feedback! Although I feel like we're still a far cry from what Plexamp has to offer in some regards, although we're closing the gap for sure! Anything you enjoy about Finamp in particular, compared to Plexamp?

1. That bug is not something I've heard of before, are you on iOS? I can't reproduce it on Android. Might get fixed with 0.9.21 though :) Either way, you should open a proper issue for it, including some logs and potentially a video for illustration!
2. That one is a known bug, from what we know so far this is only happening with FLAC files, is that the case for you too? might also get fixed with 0.9.21, but less likely.
3. Visualizer request -> Minor unimportant feature request: visualizers  #68. Not planned at the moment, but in principle I have nothing against it. Just a bit difficult to implement!
4. I was thinking we could show a button for making small adjustments to the time offset (delayed or ahead) for lyrics. A full editor might be to ambitious at the moment. There could be an option to "apply" the offset changes by sending the adjusted offsets to the server.
5. Yes exactly, that was a server-side bug that got fixed in Jellyfin 10.11.2. In general we still recommend using Jellyfin 10.10, since it's much faster than 10.11 for now. The reason why a track mix is played is that Finamp and Jellyfin can't handle loading up (potentially) thousands of tracks yet, so this is our workaround. Behavior can be adjusted in 🔗 Settings > "Interactions" > "Start Instant Mixes for Individual Tracks"!

[MnyaMnya]

Love the word for word lyric highlighting, but in dark theme the word for word highlight has the same color as the rest of the lyric and make the highlight invisible
Example:
(Dark theme)

(Light theme)

[Chaphasilor]

Thanks for reporting this!

[infinitytec]

With server version 10.11.3 out how are people feeling about potential performance issues? Is it reasonable to upgrade yet?

[Chaphasilor]

I've tried it earlier today and it seems just as slow as before to me. I still recommend staying on 10.10.7, but if you take a proper backup of your server and follow the upgrade instructions closely, you could give 10.11 a try and check for yourself!
Some people have reported that performance is fine for them (on 10.11 in general, not specifically for 10.11.3).

[infinitytec]

Thanks! I took the risk and did the upgrade. Initial loading of the library might be a bit longer than normal but other than that I have no issues.

The official Android app wasn't loading but I reset it and it works now.

[Chaphasilor]

@infinitytec alright, thanks for reporting! If you start getting metadata issues like empty albums and such, you know that's related to the upgrade. But maybe it works for you :)

[mariobrostech]

Hi,

I just migrated from the stable release to the latest beta release (0.9.24), and I noticed that the beta now includes Google Mobile Services libraries.

According to App Manager, which I am using to obtain this information, Finamp Beta includes the following libraries:

Google Mobile Services:

• com.google.android.gms.auth (1)
• com.google.android.gms.common (11)

I am curious what the function of these libraries are, and if these libraries are libre and would be compatible with F-Droid's inclusion policy (for when the releases become more stable). I am also curious why the current stable version of Finamp doesn't need these libraries, while the beta releases do.

I'm not overly concerned because these don't appear to be tracking libraries, but I am naturally cautious about anything that has to do with Google Play Services, so I would like some clarity on why these libraries are included.

Thank you!

[Komodo5197]

I flipped through our dependencies a bit but wasn't able to 100% figure out exactly what was pulling these in. It's possible this is related to our Android Auto support somehow? I also found https://pub.dev/packages/app_set_id which appears to use play services in some way to give us a unique device id, which we give to the jellyfin server to prevent login conflicts. The redesign is planned to be pushed to stable relatively soon, so if there is an F-droid compatibility issue, I guess we'll have to properly look into this.

[Chaphasilor]

Yeah I can't see the source either, do you have any insight/logs that could help us out @mariobrostech?
I don't think it's the Android Auto stuff, since we didn't need any extra dependency for that, it's all handled by just_audio, audio_service, and Android's Media Browser. But one of the device info plugins could be a possible candidate.

[Chaphasilor]

You might be right about the app_set_id package. In that case we could probably just generate a random, local ID, and save that to Hive.

I'll have to test if changing the device ID will cause a logout. If yes, we would ideally need two (Android) updates though: one to save the current AppSetId to Hive, and then the one that removes the dependency.

[Chaphasilor]

Seems like changing the device ID causes no issues (just some Playback Reporting stats might get messed up). So we could just generate a new ID for install and get rid of the package!

[Thain]

Hi! Thank you so much for the app and for the recent addition of the homescreen, Finamp has consistently been one of my favourite open source projects.

I notice that for homescreen sections, for albums, there is no option to sort by "date last played". This is sad as this is exactly the functionality I was hoping for out of the home screen, short of being able to manually "pin" a few albums that are "in rotation" for me at the moment. Is such a feature a possibility, or is it some issue on the Jellyfin side?

This next part probably qualifies as a bug (on version 0.9.24), but I can actually add a "Recently played albums" section to the home screen if in the "add home screen section" screen I select "tracks" and sort by "date last played", then switch the type over to "albums". The UI doesn't boot me out of "date last played" and I can then save the home screen section, and even click the arrow into the full album list with a sort order that seems pretty much nonsensical (it even sorts my library the exact same in both ascending and descending directions).

[manulida-dev]

Hi ! Sorry if it's been reported before, I didn't scan through the entire backlog.

Using Jellyfin server v 10.11.11

I'm having issues with casting to Chromecast (a feature I'm very excited about even though I'm soon switching to snapcast).
My installation is the following. I have 3 Chromecast Audio, connected to 3 speakers :
Salon speaker
Kitchen speaker
Bathroom speaker
For these, I have 2 speaker groups created in Google Home :
Living (salon + kitchen)
Partout (all 3 off them)

I just installed the beta and started playing music. I tried casting and whatever I tried, I wasn't getting anything on Salon Speaker, whether using the Living group or just casting to it (even though it works fine with say, youtube music).
This went on for a while, but now, I can't connect to any speakers or groups anymore, they seem to be stuck in refresh.

Here is a screenshot of what I see when trying to connect to my Chromecast, and the logs that seem related (I've redacted my domain name, but I don't understand the error since I'm connected to the server through that address. Although I did register the A DNS record just one hour ago, could it be related ?)

I did try the "prefer local network" option,thinking it might be DNS related but I'm still unable to connect to any of my Chromecasts.

Please let me know if I can help by sending more info.

[manulida-dev]

I went out for a while and when I came back, I could connect to my speakers again ! So I tried playing on Salon Speaker, it connects, even does the little connect chime, but still, no sound....
And then it clicked : Salon Speaker is the only chromecast I have that's connected with SPDIF rather than a classic audio jack cable. So I tried connecting it with a jack cable, and it works fine !

Only question is, can I make it work with SPDIF ? I'll look into it and report back.

Edit : I have to add, that I'm playing 320Mbps MP3s, that are transcoded by the server to AAC+MP4, but it does the same if I transcode to FLAC+MP4

Edit 2 : I tried casting to Salon from the native Jellyfin android app, and it manages (more or less) to do so. (I mean I get sound but the controls go all wacky)

[stein-one]

Hi, just stumbled upon this beta and sorry for kinda reviving this discussion. If it should be more related to the release discussion of the latest beta, please let me know. First of all: I really like the re-design it looks wonderful and not as "oldschool" as the current design. I however also stumbled upon some topics that I wanted to spark attention/a discussion about.

I am currently on the latest beta (1.0.1 Build 201) on IOS 27.0.1 and Jellyfin 12.2.

• Artist overview favourite filter seems to be carried over to the artist page when clikcing onto a favourite artist from this view. This leads to filtering not favourite albums from the current view without showing a filter is applied nor filter options to change that view. Not sure if thats intended behaviour or just a bug but it took me some time to realize what is actually happening there. I also saw that this behaviour does not apply when filtering for favourite playlists. Clicking onto a favourite playlist from this view opens the playlist and shows also shows all included tracks that are not on favourite list. It also shows a filter option.

• Image cache is also updated every start even with "prefer quick syncs" enabled. This is a time consuming task on bigger libraries and drastically reduces usability of download functions as this is always has priority over downloads. Imho these image sar enot changing drastically and could be removed from quick sync or have a cache validity option available in settings.

• Syncing nodes confuses me as a user, as I do not really get what is happening there as it also happens everytime when starting the app. I guess its some internal sync with the Jellyfin server and making sure of database integrity or similar. Might be in need of a better description.

• Main menu (home, albums and so on) placement on top is kinda hard to use, especially with "one-hand usage". Placement on the bottom of the screen would really help with that.

Thats it for now, might add some further feedback once I really had time using the app further. Thank you to all contributors to this great app <3.