Hey Rhythm family! I am beyond thrilled to announce that Rhythm 5.5 Stable is officially live! Over the past few weeks, your feedback, bug reports, and testing across our nightly and beta builds have been nothing short of incredible. Thanks to your passion and support, 5.5 has evolved into one of our most expansive, responsive, and feature-packed releases to date.

Whether you're streaming from your self-hosted Jellyfin or Subsonic server on the daily commute, curating a massive lossless local collection, or relaxing with your tablet or foldable in landscape mode, Rhythm 5.5 is designed to give you an unmatched, beautifully tailored listening experience.

Here is a complete walkthrough of everything new, improved, and refined in Rhythm 5.5 Stable:

cloud_download Rhythm Go: Offline Music Downloads & Local Server Discovery

Never worry about losing your tunes when stepping offline! With Rhythm Go, streaming your music library from Subsonic and Jellyfin reaches a whole new level of reliability:

  • download Full Track Offline Downloads: Download your favorite tracks and albums directly to your device storage with real-time download progress tracking and dedicated offline management.
  • sensors Local Network Auto-Discovery: Setting up your server at home is now effortless. Rhythm can automatically scan your local Wi-Fi network to detect and connect to nearby Jellyfin and Subsonic servers with a single tap.
  • phonelink_off Seamless Automatic Offline Fallback: If your network drops, your VPN reconnects, or your server becomes unreachable, Rhythm instantly falls back to your downloaded offline music so your playback never skips a beat.
  • rocket_launch Onboarding Server Setup: Getting started is smoother than ever—you can now pick your streaming provider and run local server discovery right during the initial setup tour.
  • bolt Sync Optimizations: Smashed the 20-artist Subsonic sync limit, added live sync progress indicators, and hardened cover art caching with StreamingArtworkKeyer for instant offline rendering.

tablet_android Adaptive Two-Pane Layouts for Tablets, Foldables & Desktops

Large-screen devices deserve a first-class layout, not stretched phone interfaces. We've completely rebuilt our modal sheets and dialogs with our new Adaptive Two-Pane Architecture:

  • space_dashboard Ergonomic Large-Screen Layouts: Responsive modal sheets adapt intelligently into compact dialogs, auto dialogs, wide layouts, or true two-pane views tailored for tablets, foldables, and landscape screens.
  • push_pin Pinned Headers: Sheet headers now stay securely pinned outside the scrollable content area, keeping your titles and controls visible as you browse.
  • mouse Desktop Mouse-Wheel & Fluid Scrollbars: Using a tablet with a mouse or trackpad? We've integrated direct mouse-wheel scroll support (PointerEventType.Scroll) into our smooth ExpressiveScrollBar.
  • auto_awesome Zero Visual Jitter: Eliminated transition jitter, removed artificial delay filters, and perfected top/bottom edge gradient fades for instantaneous, fluid sheet animations.

touch_app Unified & Granular Gesture Controls

Your music player should respond naturally to how you interact with your device. Rhythm 5.5 unifies and dramatically expands gesture customization across every corner of the app:

  • swipe Mini-Player Swipe Gestures: Configure horizontal swipes (swipe left/right to skip tracks) and vertical swipes (swipe up/down to expand full screen or dismiss playback) completely independently.
  • image Now Playing Artwork Taps: Customize album artwork tap gestures directly on the player screen, including single-tap (e.g. toggle synchronized lyrics), double-tap (play/pause), and tap-to-seek.
  • settings Dedicated Gestures Settings: Fine-tune tactile behavior and gestures for the player, mini-player, queue, library tabs, and lyrics screens all in one organized place.

queue_music Revamped Playback Queue & Context-Aware Playback

We've completely overhauled how your queue behaves, making it smarter, cleaner, and much more flexible:

  • playlist_play Played & Up-Next Sections: The queue bottom sheet is now cleanly divided into played tracks and upcoming songs, complete with sticky section headers.
  • drag_indicator Swipe-to-Dismiss & Drag-and-Drop: Effortlessly swipe songs away to remove them from your queue, or drag and drop tracks with smooth, responsive animations.
  • album Respect Album & Artist Context (#546): One of our most requested features! Tapping a song inside an album or artist view now naturally queues the remaining songs from that collection from the tapped track onwards—working consistently across local music, streaming, and Rhythm Go.
  • shuffle Keep Shuffle Active Option: Tired of shuffle turning off when you hand-pick a specific song from your library? You can now enable an option to keep shuffle mode engaged even after manually selecting a track.
  • low_priority Shuffle Engine Queue Order Preservation: Using Play Next or Add to Queue strictly respects your sequential queue order, even while active shuffle mode is engaged.
  • tune Unified List-Queue Rules: Playlists now share the same intuitive list-queue behaviors (replace, ask, play next, add to end) as albums and artists, with clearer settings and animated clear-all actions.

smart_button Customizable Bottom Player Action Buttons

Take complete ownership of your Now Playing screen! In both Normal Mode and Merge Mode, you can now re-order and customize the action buttons at the bottom of the player. Whether you want instant one-tap access to Synchronized Lyrics, the 10-Band Equalizer, Sleep Timer, Playback Speed & Pitch, or Share, you can configure your controls to match your exact listening habits.

lyrics Next-Gen Lyrics Engine: TTML, Enhanced ELRC & Touch Suppression

Our lyrics engine received a massive upgrade for power users and music lovers alike:

  • save TTML & Enhanced LRC (.elrc) Export: Export and save embedded or synchronized lyrics directly to standardized TTML and Enhanced LRC files.
  • edit Built-in Lyrics Editor: Adjust timestamp offsets, edit lyrics line-by-line, and fine-tune time synchronization per-track directly in the app.
  • find_in_page Local Sidecar File Discovery: Automatic discovery and priority loading for local .ttml and .lrc sidecar files sitting next to your music files.
  • touch_app Touch-Aware Gesture Suppression: Tired of lyrics snapping back automatically while you're trying to read ahead? Rhythm now suppresses auto-scrolling the moment you touch or scroll the lyrics list, smoothly resuming tracking only when you let go.
  • translate Unicode Script & Romanization: Enhanced Unicode script detection for automatic line-level timing and furigana/pinyin romanization support.

bolt Instant Backward Seeking & Audio Engine Hardening

Performance under the hood received serious attention to make playback rock-solid:

  • fast_rewind 10-Second Back-Buffer Caching: Backward seeking is now instantaneous! Leveraging Media3 1.11 SeekParameters with a dedicated 10-second back-buffer cache, rewinding plays immediately with zero re-buffering stalls.
  • precision_manufacturing Sample-Accurate Scrubbing: High-precision dynamic scrubbing with sample-accurate playback alignment on release.
  • shield OS Watchdog SIGKILL Prevention: Fixed an issue where folder operations resolved song paths synchronously on the main thread, moving all ContentResolver queries to background threads to prevent system watchdog termination on large libraries.
  • volume_up AudioFlinger HAL Crash Guard: Guarded Equalizer recreation across track transitions so it only initializes when audio sessions genuinely change, preventing native audio HAL crashes.
  • battery_saver Uninterrupted Background Playback: Added WAKE_LOCK with ExoPlayer WAKE_MODE_LOCAL to keep background playback active and steady even under aggressive Android battery restrictions.

label Smart Multi-Artist Splitting & Library Normalization

  • group Word-Boundary Delimiter Parsing: Hardened artist splitting with word-boundary detection, preventing multi-character delimiters like ft. and feat. from splitting artist names into individual letters or breaking artists like Daft Punk.
  • schedule Millisecond Timestamp Normalization: Normalized all date_added and date_modified timestamps to milliseconds with an automatic Room database migration, ensuring rock-solid sorting across all your devices.
  • folder_special Library Scanner Integrity: Fixed missing artist indexing, resolved empty album navigation routes, and fixed media scanner folder whitelist filtering.
  • arrow_back Predictive Back Navigation: Restored custom route-aware pop enter/exit transitions for Navigation Compose 2.10.

palette Expressive Material 3 Visuals & Global Community

  • auto_awesome Harmonized Expressive Palettes: Settings and onboarding badges now feature luminous pastel container backgrounds and semantic contextual icon palettes.
  • contrast Monochrome & Neutral Artwork Extraction: Added automatic black-and-white cover art detection, generating elegant monochrome palettes that complement minimalist artwork.
  • language 27+ Updated Languages: A huge shoutout to our incredible translators on Weblate! Rhythm 5.5 brings fresh translation updates across Simplified & Traditional Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Polish, Arabic, and more.

download Download Rhythm 5.5 Stable Today!

Rhythm 5.5 Stable is rolling out across all our channels:

  • GitHub Releases: Download the latest universal and architecture-specific APKs directly from GitHub.
  • Google Play Closed Beta: Enrolled in our Play Store testing track? The update will arrive automatically via Google Play.
  • inventory_2 F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid & Obtainium: 5.5 will be available as repository indexes refresh over the coming hours.

Thank you all so much for being an essential part of the Rhythm community. Put on your favorite album, test out the new features, and come share your thoughts with us on Discord and Telegram!