See what's new, what's been fixed, and what's changed in each version of SugarSpin.
The device picker is now called Stream To, and it’s grown into a proper little control room for everything you play on. Open it and you see what’s playing right now at the top, then a simple list of every device and hi-fi speaker you can send the music to. Tap one to move the sound there. No clutter, no duplicate panels — everything about your devices lives in this one sheet now.
Tap into any device to see its detail page and give it a friendly name — tap the pencil by the title, type, done. Set a default device from the card at the top so the music lands where you want it when you press play, and a gold dot in the list shows you at a glance which one is the default. Finished with a device? One tap on the × signs it out. It all syncs across your account, so you can manage any device from any other one.
The floating Stream To button now shows a small set of dancing equalizer bars in SugarSpin gold — a little nod to the music moving, instead of a static icon.
Hold and drag to rearrange your Playlists, Shelves, and Liked Songs. As you move one, the others gently slide apart to open a gap, a little copy of what you're holding follows your finger, and it drops neatly into place. Your order is saved and carries straight over to the Home screen. A quick tap still opens or plays, only a deliberate drag moves things.
A new Levels view in Display Settings turns the screen into a real-time meter bridge, peak, loudness (LUFS), stereo width, dynamic range, range over time (LRA), and bass energy, all reading live off whatever's playing. It only watches the music, it never changes a thing. A clean, nerdy joy for anyone who likes to see the sound.
Song rows are simpler now: tap anywhere on a row and it plays. No more accidental jumps to an artist or album page when your finger lands on a name. Less fiddly, especially on a phone.
The add screens are now simple on/off toggles. The playlists or shelves a song or album already lives in show a gold check, tap to add, tap the checked one to take it back out. The sheet stays open so you can sort several at once, then close when you're done.
A labeled volume slider now lives in the Now Playing panel, showing the device it's controlling and the current level, so you can set the volume without leaving the screen you're on.
SugarSpin uses a single server address, the same one at home and away. Enter it once — the app even fills it in for you — and you never think about it again. Setup is a single field, one login per device, and it just works whether you're on home Wi-Fi or out on cellular. No second password screen, ever.
The install guide now leads with Tailscale: a free, private network that makes your home server reachable from anywhere as if you were on your own Wi-Fi. With its subnet-router option, your one home address (like http://192.168.1.50:3333) keeps working on the road, so there's nothing to switch when you walk out the door. Prefer a clean public web link instead? Cloudflare Tunnel is still fully supported as the shareable-URL option. Either way, SugarSpin only needs a single address from you.
The iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps now ask for just one server address on first launch. Existing installs are migrated automatically, if you already had a URL saved, it carries over and you stay signed in. Nothing to redo.
A new Appearance setting lets you pick the app's accent. SugarSpin keeps its signature gold as the lead color, and you choose the one highlight that rides alongside it, Deep Teal (the new default), VU-Meter Blue, or Warm Cream. It shows up where it counts, the active page in the sidebar, the player's progress, and selected tabs, and your pick is remembered instantly. High-end retro hi-fi, your way.
Press play on whichever device you're at, and that device becomes the one making sound, instantly. Your Mac, your phone, your iPad, the playback follows your hands. Everything stays in sync across your screens, you simply choose where the audio comes out.
The device picker now shows all of your active devices and BluOS / NAD speakers from any screen, including your phone. Tap one to send the music there. No more wondering where playback went, it's all right in front of you.
SugarSpin now ships as a proper native macOS app. It’s Apple notarized, Apple Silicon ready, and lives in your Dock like any pro app. No browser tabs, no address bar, no browser quirks, just SugarSpin in a real window. Free with any license, included with the server you already own.
A native iOS app is in development, TestFlight beta first, then the App Store. It will be a free download with full lock screen Now Playing controls, CarPlay, and iPad split view support. Your existing SugarSpin license is all you’ll need.
A new full screen view built for the TV on the wall, the 4K monitor, the iPad propped on the shelf. The whole screen becomes the artist: a slow slideshow of artist photography, or every album cover you own by that artist when no photos exist, or the classic blurred cover. Along the bottom, a full width strip with the track's real audio waveform, drawn from the actual file and scrubbable with a finger. Above it, the song title with its DR badge and a format pill (FLAC · 24-bit / 96 kHz), then artist and album. Title text flips between white and black depending on the photo behind it. Optional giant synced lyrics. Everything scales with the screen, from iPad to 4K. Pick Stage in Display Settings, choose your backdrop, hit Showtime. Landscape, iPad and desktop.
One tidy popup: a View grid with little icons (Vinyl, Lyrics, Scope, Tubes, Stage, None), the Background picker, a new Fullscreen toggle that works for every view (toolbar gone, just music), and a gold SHOWTIME button that commits your picks and takes you there. Stage gets its own second page for view and backdrop choices, with a proper Back button. Your choices are remembered.
The floating buttons were rebuilt from scratch as one clean dock: Now Playing (dancing bars), Casting, and Display Settings, the same three on every page and device. They ride just above the player bar, fade away after five seconds of stillness, and fan back up from the bottom, one behind the other, the moment you touch the screen. A duplicate device picker button that had been hiding in the player bar is gone for good.
Start typing in the search bar and results drop down live, grouped the way you think: Artist, Albums with cover thumbnails, Songs, and a “See all results” link. An empty search box now shows your recent searches, click one to run it again.
A new Stream to row in the Casting sheet opens your platform's native output picker: AirPlay & Bluetooth on iPhone, iPad and Mac, Google Cast on Android and Chrome. Your BluOS devices stay right where they were, this adds the rest of the living room.
Switching to another app no longer stops the music. The audio processing graph now loads only when a sound shaping feature (Tube Warmth, ReplayGain) is actually on, so everyday playback stays on the OS's native path and keeps playing in the background the way a music app should.
Devices could cling to an old cached copy of the app after a server update. The app now detects a stale build and refreshes itself automatically, and the version number jumped to 1.9.6 so every update checker agrees on what's newest.
The Active Clients panel updates in real time across every device. Sign in or out on one device and every other open client sees the change within ~50 ms via socket broadcast. Each row shows an Online (green dot) or Standby (gray) pill that flips the instant a device closes the app. No more polling, no more refresh button. Active Clients and Session Settings have been merged into one tidy card.
The sidebar got tidier. Playlists, Liked Songs, and Unknown (unmatched tracks) are now grouped under a single Library tab between Artists and Categories. Inside, three label only pills switch the body content without page loads. Selected tab persists to the URL so deep links and the back button work. Inside Liked, Albums is the default view (Songs is one click away). All on one row even on iPhone.
A long standing JavaScript falsy zero bug meant the “Never” option for auto logout was secretly being treated as 30 minutes, quietly pruning sessions every half hour and kicking other devices out. Fixed. Pick Never and your sessions persist until you explicitly sign out or click Remove on a device.
Every ripped FLAC now ships with a complete Vorbis comment block: ARTIST, ALBUMARTIST, ALBUM, TITLE, TRACKNUMBER, TRACKTOTAL, DISCNUMBER, DISCTOTAL, DATE, GENRE, and MusicBrainz release ID. Multi disc sets land in Album/CD N/ subfolders, so files never collide. The ripper also picks the correct medium from MusicBrainz by matching the inserted disc’s track count, insert Disc 2 of a 2 disc release and you get Disc 2’s titles, not Disc 1’s. No more hand renaming.
Folders like Album CD 1, King Kong Disc 2, or any …CD N / …Disc N pattern are now detected as discs of one album rather than separate albums. Tags win for artist and album name; folder structure provides the disc number. The Album detail view shows clean “CD 1” / “CD 2” section headers in the track list.
When SugarSpin scans more than one music folder, the progress counter now aggregates across all of them, instead of resetting between folders and reporting only the last one’s count as “Processed N files.” The number you see at the end is the real total walked across your entire library.
Every album cover in the app is now the same size on every device. Stretching the window adds more columns to the right, it never makes tiles grow or shrink. Sparse sections (like Jump Back In or Compressed tier in Hi Res) collapse to one row instead of showing an empty second row. The missing artwork placeholder got a fresh look: clean gradient with the title centered.
Recently Added, Recently Played, Based on Your Listening, Recommended for Today, and Jump Back In each carry up to 60 albums now, plenty to scroll through on a wide desktop. The greeting tagline cycles through 50+ music world conversational lines split by time of day (“Coffee, headphones, go.” / “3 AM is for deep cuts.” / “Make tonight sound expensive.”).
The Mastering Versions page (find albums you own multiple pressings of) now shows each version as a proper album cover tile with a DR medallion in the corner, grouped per artist. Same visual language as the rest of the app instead of the old list view.
Duplicate “Delete Album” button in the Edit Album modal is gone, one subtle gray button only. Active Clients labels stop saying “Unknown on macOS” when the user agent doesn’t identify cleanly (now shows just the OS, or detects SugarSpin App / SugarSpin Desktop wrappers). Mobile right edge alignment on the Albums page lines up perfectly with the page header again.
The Mac desktop app is here. Apple Developer ID signed and Apple notarized, so macOS opens it like any other pro app, no scary warnings, no right click open dance. Lives in your Dock, has its own menu bar (About, Switch Server, Reload, Quit), discovers SugarSpin servers on your network automatically, and uses dramatically less memory than a Chrome tab. Free with any SugarSpin license, download from the apps section.
A quick honest word: the Mac and iPhone apps aren’t rewritten from scratch in Swift or AppKit. They’re native shells (Tauri on Mac, a native iOS shell on iPhone & iPad) that load the same SugarSpin interface you already know. We did this on purpose. It means the apps are tiny, launch fast, every feature on the website also lives in the app, and there’s zero version drift between platforms, what ships on the server ships everywhere on day one. CarPlay, lock screen controls, AirPlay routing, native menus, and Bonjour discovery are all wired into the shell so they work properly. We get the polish of native plus the speed of web. No tradeoffs you’d notice.
When Watchtower pulls a new version and restarts the server, every open SugarSpin client now shows a clean popup: "SugarSpin is updating…" with an animated progress shimmer. When the server comes back up, you see "Update complete! Now running vX.Y.Z, reloading the app…" and the page auto refreshes itself. No more Cmd+Shift+R, no more wondering if the update actually happened.
The Profile page is now ordered the way you actually use it: Server Access (your server address) at the top, then Subsonic App Access for third party CarPlay/Android Auto clients, then Auto Updates. The "CarPlay & External Apps" card was renamed to Subsonic App Access, clearer about what it actually is, and a reminder that once our own iOS app lands, CarPlay will work natively through SugarSpin without needing a Subsonic compatible third party app at all.
The native iOS & iPadOS app is live in TestFlight beta. Free download from the App Store when it ships publicly, connects to the server you already own, no in app purchases. Lock screen Now Playing, real background audio (something Safari simply can’t do), AirPlay routing, and CarPlay support are all on the way. Watch the apps section for the public launch.
New installs automatically include Watchtower, a tiny container that polls Docker Hub for new SugarSpin releases and installs them within 24 hours. No SSH, no terminal, no thinking. There’s a new Auto Updates panel in Profile → Server Access that shows the status and a “Check for updates now” button for the impatient. Existing customers can add Watchtower from a copy paste snippet in the same panel.
When connecting from the Mac app or (soon) iPhone & iPad app, the Active Clients list now shows your actual device name (“Roger’s MacBook Pro on macOS”) instead of “Unknown on macOS”. Helps when you’ve got a bunch of devices connected and need to figure out which is which.
A focused pass on the player surfaces, making the most used controls easier to reach, harder to mis tap, and consistent across phone, tablet, and desktop.
Artist / Album / Track folder layout, the scanner now treats the folder names as the source of truth for artist and album, regardless of what the file’s embedded ID3 tags say. This stops single tracks with broken metadata from being filed under nonsense names like “wildfiltersweeps376 / Unknown Album” when the folder clearly says they belong to a real album./api/library/rescan endpoint now accepts requests from localhost without an auth cookie, so admins can trigger a rescan via SSH+curl directly on the server. The endpoint still requires authentication from remote clients.The 15 band EQ has been pulled from this release while the audio chain and UI are reworked. The earlier implementation had real time DSP issues (laggy on mobile, occasional rendering crashes on iOS) and the slider sizing made it hard to dial in precise curves. Rather than ship something that doesn’t live up to the bit perfect promise of SugarSpin, it’s coming out now and will return once the design and audio processing pipeline are solid. Tube Warmth stays, it’s the lighter, opt in coloration most listeners actually wanted from the EQ anyway.