Hey everyone! 👋 Over the past several weeks, I've focused heavily on performance profiling, startup architecture, and library organization. Today, I'm thrilled to roll out Rhythm 5.4 Stable!
Whether you have a massive library of 50,000+ lossless tracks, listen across multiple artist collaborations, or want instant response times on startup, this release delivers major speed and quality-of-life enhancements.
⚡ Instant Non-Blocking Cold Startup
No more staring at loading spinners when launching the app! Rhythm 5.4 boots instantly with asynchronous background media synchronization and a non-intrusive live progress indicator bubble. You can dive straight into playback while indexing completes quietly in the background.
👥 Multi-Artist Splitting & Delimiter Presets
Tired of collaboration tracks creating clutter with separate duplicate artists? Rhythm 5.4 introduces intelligent multi-artist splitting:
- 🎛️ Delimiter Presets: Pre-configured splitters for comma (
,), slash (/), ampersand (&), semicolon (;),feat., andft.. - 🛠️ Custom Delimiters: Define your own custom splitting rules to match your unique tagging schemes.
- 📂 Unified Artist Catalog: Browse each collaborating artist's discography cleanly without duplicate catalog entries.
⏱️ Minimum Song Duration Filter
Under Settings → Library → Media Scan, you can now set a minimum song duration threshold to automatically exclude ringtones, voice memos, and short notification clips from your music library.
🎨 On-Demand Lossless Coil Artwork Fetcher & Keyer
Overhauled artwork extraction using a custom Coil AudioArtworkFetcher and Keyer. Memory consumption during fast library scrolling is drastically reduced while ensuring crisp, lossless cover art rendering.
📱 Docked Navigation & Ambient Zoom
Added docked navigation modes for wider displays and subtle ambient zoom effects for active album covers during playback.
🔄 Update Channel Management & Downgrade Prevention
Refactored our in-app update channel checking and version comparison logic to guard against accidental downgrades that could cause database incompatibilities.
🛠️ Audio Engine & Service Polish
- 🛡️ Service Permission Mask: Fixed MediaPlaybackService controller player command permission masks.
- 💥 OOM Prevention: Resolved Room playlist transaction memory spikes and Canvas ExoPlayer memory leaks.
- 🌐 Jellyfin Connection Diagnostics: User-friendly error messaging and diagnostics on server connection failures.
- 📦 Modern Android Dependencies: Bumped Material3 to 1.5.0-alpha27, Glance widgets, and AndroidX Navigation.
A huge thank you to everyone who tested nightly builds and reported issues. Download 5.4 Stable today and enjoy a faster, cleaner Rhythm! ❤️🎶