What changed in each build.

The CarPlay Music screen is now a set of tiles: Library, Liked, Playlists, and Recent, plus Downloads and Up Next when they have content. Library opens to Artists, Albums, and Songs. Album and artist grids size themselves to the car's screen, so a wide display shows four covers per row.

CarPlay limits how long a list can be, so large libraries are split into letter folders. Headroom now groups them into ranges with a count on each, which takes "A" from about 26 folders to about 5 on my library. Songs has a "Jump to…" row for picking starting letters.

Browse screens open right away and fill in as results arrive, which helps most on a slow connection. Opening a letter in Albums loads only that letter.

Headroom connects to a Plex server over the local network first whenever it can, and picks a route again after a network change. Manage Servers shows whether the active Plex server is connected Local, Remote, or Relay. Artist and album pages ask the server for less data, and smart playlists work on more Plex setups.

You can now choose and reorder up to five Home rows. Build the page around favorites, genres, playlists, mixes, saved radio stations, downloads, podcasts, or audiobooks. Headroom only loads the rows you choose, and content that is not available for your connected servers stays out of the way.

The new Genres row opens paged album collections without scanning your entire library. Artist pages can show either your own most-played tracks or broader listener popularity when a supported source is available. You can save the displayed artist ranking as a playlist, and new Home rows surface favorites, recent listening, new releases, downloads, custom mixes, and saved radio stations.

New experimental Smart Radio controls let you adjust how a station balances relevance, variety, recommendation sources, recent artists, and less certain discoveries. The original radio behavior remains the default. You can save a preset for a library or tune an individual artist, album, or track station.

Downloaded audiobooks now provide a fuller offline experience. Your downloaded library remains available without a server connection, including after restarting Headroom. Playback uses the files on your device, works across chapter boundaries and in the background, and records your listening position locally. When you reconnect, Headroom syncs the progress you made offline back to Audiobookshelf.

Home, Library, album, audiobook, and podcast screens now focus their work on what is actually visible. Continue Listening reuses cached details, long album track lists render in a window, download badges use lightweight counts, and library indexing pauses when you leave.

This beta also includes more polish for Plex connections, background playback, chapter navigation, CarPlay, and Android Auto.

Try the new Home editor, build a Smart Radio station, or take a downloaded audiobook somewhere without a connection. Feedback and diagnostics are available under Settings → Advanced → Diagnostics.

Headroom now handles servers with multiple music libraries more clearly. You can switch libraries from the Library tab or Settings, and Now Playing shows which library the current song belongs to.

The audiobook and podcast players have also been refreshed with artwork-based colors, a cleaner layout, and more consistent playback controls.

CarPlay and Android Auto received enhancements for browsing, artwork loading, large libraries, reconnecting, Back navigation, and playback while the phone is locked.

Once a queue got big enough, opening and scrolling it got slow and sometimes unreliable. The queue list is now virtualized: it draws only the rows that are visible and swaps them in as you scroll, instead of building the entire list up front.

The full queue is still there and still browsable. You can jump around in it, remove songs, and move tracks. What changes is how fast it opens and how smoothly it scrolls when the queue is huge.

This also clears the way for more queue performance work, since the list no longer has to touch every track just to render.

Smart Radio now keeps refilling the queue as you listen. Start a station from a track, album, or artist and pick Focused, Balanced, or Adventurous tuning. The station page shows what's coming next and lets you search the queue, rebuild the station, or save it as a playlist.

On Navidrome servers with AudioMuse similarity data, AudioMuse Mix works the same way as an auto-refilling station. Headroom follows AudioMuse's similarity graph, avoids repeats, retries temporary failures, and restores the station after an app restart.

Both kinds of station keep adding tracks as long as there are fresh matches. When AudioMuse runs out of unique matches, Headroom says so instead of switching to a different recommendation system behind your back.

Also fixed: the All filter in Songs now works correctly on Navidrome libraries.

Browsing and playback for Navidrome and other OpenSubsonic servers has been in since the first beta. On a Navidrome server with the AudioMuse-AI similarity extension, you can start an AudioMuse Mix from a track and Headroom builds it from that track's matches.

The mix only shows up when the server reports the extension, and the track has to have similarity data already. If there are no matches, Headroom tells you, rather than quietly swapping in a different recommendation source.

After that I want to cover the rest of what these servers offer a client: internet radio stations managed on the server, jukebox control, playback bookmarks stored server-side, and whatever else shows up in the recommendation and discovery endpoints.

None of that has a date. It's the direction, not a promise.

EQ and crossfade now work while music plays over AirPlay in my iOS development build. This has been one of the hardest audio problems in the app. I still need to test more receivers, route changes, skipping, and queue edits before it goes to beta.

Radio has a full station page now for track, album, and artist radio. It shows what's coming next, and you can search the queue, pick Focused, Balanced, or Adventurous tuning, rebuild the station, or save it as a playlist.

Now Playing is getting a calmer layout with fewer controls fighting for space. Lyrics, audio output, and Up Next stay next to the player. Sleep Timer, SyncPlay, and the other secondary actions move into the menu.

The AirPlay work isn't in a beta build yet. I'll add the build number here when it is.

What's in it

Jellyfin, Navidrome and other OpenSubsonic servers, Plex, Emby, and Audiobookshelf. Gapless playback, adjustable crossfade, ReplayGain, parametric EQ, AutoEQ headphone profiles, offline downloads, background playback, and lock-screen and system media controls. There are no purchases, subscriptions, or trials in this build.

What I'm still checking

Unusual reverse proxies, remote HTTPS, very large libraries, token refresh, switching between Bluetooth, AirPlay, Chromecast, and car systems, and server-specific edge cases. Emby and non-Navidrome OpenSubsonic servers have had the least testing so far.