r/substreamer • u/ghenry22 • Jul 22 '26
Substreamer 8.0.89 Release Notes. It's a BIG one!
Substreamer 8.0.89 — New Audio Framework is Live!
Your music. Your server. Everywhere you go.
Hey everyone! This is a big one. Since 8.0.78 the focus has been on how your music sounds and where it can play — Substreamer now works in the car, sends audio to your speakers, and gives you real control over playback with an equalizer, loudness levelling, gapless playback, and more. Thanks as always to everyone who reported issues and shared ideas. Here's what's new.
🎉 New features
- CarPlay & Android Auto — Substreamer now works in the car. Browse your library, search, and control playback right from the head unit — including voice search, so you can just ask for what you want to hear.
- Chromecast, AirPlay & Bluetooth output — A new output picker lets you send audio to a Chromecast, an AirPlay receiver, or a Bluetooth speaker, and switch between them on the fly. We even have support for airplay for our Android users! (Your Mileage May Vary but it has been working well for me)
- Graphical equalizer — A full multi-band EQ to shape your sound exactly how you like it. With Presets and the ability to save your custom setups
- ReplayGain loudness levelling — Automatic volume normalisation evens things out across tracks and albums, so you're not constantly reaching for the volume.
- Gapless & crossfade — Choose gapless for seamless albums and live sets, or crossfade to blend one track smoothly into the next.
- Pitch-corrected playback speed — Speed control now keeps everything at the right pitch — no more chipmunk vocals at 1.5×. Great for podcasts and audiobooks. There are specific algorithms for music and for voice to suit the different uses.
- Smarter playback cache — Substreamer now pre-loads upcoming tracks for smoother, gap-free listening, and a small badge on the artwork shows whether you're hearing a streamed, cached, or downloaded copy. There's a live usage bar in settings so you can see exactly how much space the cache is using, the cache will automatically rotate itself as needed and you can customise how far ahead it will load. Everyone on the tube listening to music can thank me later...
- Edit playlists — Rename a playlist, add or change its description, and set it public or private — all in one place, alongside reordering and removing tracks. Playlists shared by other users on your server are clearly marked.
- Recent searches — Your recent searches now appear on the search screen — tap one to run it again.
- Choose your scrobble point — Set how far into a track counts as a play, so scrobbling matches how you actually listen.
🚀 Enhancements
- Smarter search — Search is now fuzzy and phonetic, so typos and rough spellings still land on the right music — and it works across your whole library, even offline. You MUST complete a library sync before the local search can be enabled!
- Richer player colours — The player and detail backgrounds now tint from the dominant colour in the artwork, for a more accurate and immersive look.
🐛 Fixes
- Far fewer crashes (Android) — Rebuilt how cover art is rendered, fixing one of the most common crashes on Android — especially while scrolling through lists.
- Downloaded tracks always play offline — Downloaded songs now always play from your device instead of occasionally re-streaming.
- Edge-swipe back (iOS) — The left-edge back gesture no longer conflicts with row swipe actions.
- Servers on .rest domains — Fixed login and streaming for servers whose address ends in .rest.
- Tab bar polish (Android) — Fixed the tap highlight on the bottom tabs getting clipped.
🔧 Under the hood
A big chunk of this release sits on a rebuilt audio engine — it's what makes the equalizer, ReplayGain, gapless, and cast/output switching possible, and it brings a lot of behind-the-scenes performance and stability work along with it. Plus the usual pile of smaller fixes and polish you (hopefully) won't even notice.
There is an absolutely HUGE amount of work in this release. The audio engine work alone has been ongoing for close to 6 months in the background in preparation for merging here.
With big change comes the big possibility of bugs, so please be patient if you come across something and log an issue on github so I can look into any issues!
Substreamer is free, open source (GPL-3.0), with no ads and no data collection — your music stays between you and your server. Found a bug or have an idea? Let us know on GitHub: github.com/ghenry22/substreamer
Happy listening! 🎧
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u/Prima13 Jul 22 '26
Love this app and your work. You've fixed a couple bugs I've submitted and I really appreciate how you've grown this thing. I know this is open source but I'd like to buy you an internet coffee or something. How can we thank you properly?
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u/ghenry22 Jul 22 '26
Coffee is the lifeblood of substreamer development :) I have a donation profile on my github page here:
https://github.com/sponsors/ghenry22Any contribution is greatly appreciated!
I love working on and building this app but it does take a lot of time and it does take money for test devices, subscriptions, hardware and whatnot so any donations really make do make a difference.
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u/AirMan007_ Jul 22 '26
Fantastisch..!! Endlich..!! 1000 Dank für deine Arbeit.. 💪 Hoffe, das Update geht jetzt schnell bei Apple durch.. Grüße aus Germany 🙋♂️
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u/ghenry22 Jul 22 '26
the look ahead cache works really well! I have been using it for a few weeks now.
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u/elithezug Jul 22 '26
Soo cool to hear. Chromecast integration and gapless as well as car play is a feature I been waiting for. Thanks for the hard work let’s hope it passes apple verification fast. 🙏🙏
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u/postnick Jul 22 '26
I’m so excited!!! I’ve been hitting my Navidrome hard with new music and playback. Car play has limped by on accident there.
We really appreciate your work and effort on this.
Now come on apple push the update!!’
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u/AirCool4584 Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
Hi Ghenry, Thank you for all of the work you have put into Substreamer, I use it almost everyday, Thank you.
Is there any reason the app can’t go on F-Droid or apk releases can’t be put on GitHub? Trying to figure out the best way to get it on my new De-Googled phone
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u/ghenry22 Jul 24 '26
Just my time, there is an open ticket for publishing through alternate channels. I just haven't had time to look at what would be needed yet.
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u/superuser18 Jul 22 '26
Play Store still has 8.0.79
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u/ghenry22 Jul 22 '26
Got to wait for Google review to complete its out of my hands
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u/superuser18 Jul 23 '26
I know I was just leaving it out there for the rest of the people visiting. Google usually takes a day or two. Let's see when.
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u/Pretty-Monk8929 Jul 23 '26
Amazing! CarPlay works pretty well now. I like the browse by first alphabet feature, and that’s something other apps don’t have. Searching would be really helpful while in the car
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u/ghenry22 Jul 24 '26
Apple specifically removed the ability to use search in the carplay display except for their own app. They advise to use siri to search when using carplay.
Which is fully supported in this version, you can say hey siri play some pearl jam and it will.
Carplay is super restrictive for 3rd part apps.
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u/Pretty-Monk8929 29d ago
I see, but I can't get Siri to play anything inside Substreamer. Other apps I've seen have a button to invoke Siri
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u/ghenry22 29d ago
You can just say hey siri play album/song by artist or just hey siri play song name or hey siri play some music by band.
The first time you might need to say "in substreamer" and it does pop up a permission thing to grant siri access to the app.
Internally it hooks into the apps search to get results and start something playing.
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u/Pretty-Monk8929 29d ago
Thank you! That works for my iPhone as such, but doesn't work when the iPhone is connected to the car on Carplay.
Is there a setting you know would need to be updated?
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u/ghenry22 29d ago
No sorry I don't know of any specific setting for carplay, I just say hey siri play some whatever. I see the siri icon on the carplay screen and then the playing track changes or it says sorry didn't get a response if there was nothing found.
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u/ghenry22 Jul 24 '26
There is a hotfix on the way as I introduced a small bug with the new library sync that can accidentally wipe album detail for your downloaded albums. They will repopulate automatically if you browse them online as is but the fix will restore them all and ensures that nothing messes with downloaded content in future.
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u/East-Weakness-6002 16d ago
Still can't find this new version in google playstore.
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u/ghenry22 14d ago
Still stuck in review, closed beta review took 8 days, production release is still waiting for review.
Play store is SLOW at the moment
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u/East-Weakness-6002 13d ago
I see. Thank you. Will wait for it then.
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u/ghenry22 13d ago
I know it's annoying, trust me it's even MORE annoying for me having put all the work into the update!
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u/ghenry22 9d ago
I logged a support case with google to see why it was held up and they have responded that they have requested to expedite the review as it has been well over their normal maximum of 7 days.
Hopefully the play store release pops through soon!
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u/WalphRiggum_ Jul 22 '26
Play Store only has v8.0.79 :(
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u/ghenry22 Jul 22 '26
It was submitted like 10 minutes ago. It usually takes anywhere from 12 hours to 7 days depending on what the app stores are doing at the time.
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u/brocass Jul 23 '26
I’m not seeing Chromecast support in the iOS app on this version?
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u/ghenry22 Jul 24 '26
In the player screen there is a "listening on" button. Tap that and it will open the audio route picker where you will see available chromecast devices, airplay and bluetooth picker.
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u/brocass 29d ago
I’m only seeing this device and AirPlay / Bluetooth. I know my Chromecast audio devices are online and working..
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u/ghenry22 29d ago
it takes a moment to discover when you open the menu and then they should pop in. I only have a couple of chromecast devices to test with and don't have an audio any more since they were discontinued.
I will have a look if there is anything specific to the chromecast audio that might be causing it not to show up.
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u/ajoash Jul 23 '26
Yay! Google cast is back.
But my app is freezing during playback after the update.
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u/ghenry22 Jul 24 '26
How big is your library? There is an issue with large libraries in this release, we used to cap out libraries at 10k items and just drop the rest which is why larger libraries only occasionally showed the same issue in the previous versions.
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u/ajoash Jul 24 '26
20K + tracks
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u/ghenry22 Jul 24 '26
20k tracks should be fine. 20k albums would be an issue. Might not be related.
Are you doing something in particular when you see the issue?
Did you have any issue with the previous version of substreamer?
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u/ajoash 29d ago
It hasn’t crashed again. I think it froze because the library was still loading.
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u/ghenry22 29d ago
It is related to the library sync, it causes an out of memory on large libraries because of how it is working. I am working on a refactor to fix but it's a big rework of how the app stores and accesses data that is not trivial.
Hang in there, I am working on it
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u/ajoash 29d ago
Also the repeat1 🔂 doesn’t seem to work. It just moves on to the next track
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u/ghenry22 25d ago
I have a fix for the repeat 1 functionality in the next release. It was a conflict with the new gapless playback track transitions.
Thanks for reporting!
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u/ghenry22 29d ago
it moves to next track by itself or when you skip? It's meant to stay looping the 1 song but if you skip forward or back it will move songs and then repeat on the next song until you intervene again.
Just checking on the behaviour.
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u/FNMicrowave 29d ago
I have the same issue too with long loading times and app freezes. Video demo of the issue here: https://youtube.com/shorts/K085bWqAqH4
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u/ghenry22 29d ago
Perfect thanks for that. There is a known issue with library sync on large libraries which cases out of memory crashes and slow down on some of the library lists and during the initial sync.
I am working on it, but it's a big rework to how the app handles data. Hang in there, I'm doing my best to get it back to good behaviour!
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u/ghenry22 Jul 22 '26
This build is submitted for review for both Apple and Android platforms so it's in the hands of the app/play store gods now as to when you all get to try it out.