Lotus

• Fetching artwork from MusicBrainz works again after being quietly broken since 1.5.0, .opus files can finally carry cover art without being damaged, shuffle has been rebuilt, and Lotus now speaks Spanish and Simplified Chinese.
• ●Cover art and metadata The metadata search lives at a track's ⋮ menu → Track info → the pencil icon → Look for metadata. It needs Settings → Privacy → "Allow network lookups" turned on, which is off by default.
• ・Cover art from a metadata search downloads again. The artwork archive redirects twice before handing over the image, and since 1.5.0 Lotus followed only the first hop — so every attempt ended in a generic error. It broke as a side effect of the network hardening in that release, which turned off automatic redirects for good reasons; the hand-written replacement was simply one hop short. Redirects stay off, and every hop is still checked against an allow-list. ・Artwork falls back to the album when a specific pressing has none. Not every individual release in the archive has an uploaded cover; Lotus now asks the album it belongs to before giving up. ・Search results are ranked and de-duplicated. Official releases sort above bootlegs and compilations, and the same album no longer appears half a dozen times because it was pressed in six countries. ・Field searches actually work. artist:"Alter Bridge" AND recording:"Slip to the Void" was being escaped into a literal string, so it matched nothing useful. The in-app search tips were also wrong on two counts and have been corrected — the quotes are what make AND work, and field names are not case-sensitive. ・MusicBrainz IDs are now saved. When you apply a search result, its release, release-group and album-artist IDs are written to the file's tags. The code to do this already existed but nothing ever handed it the IDs.
• ●OPUS files
• ・Cover art can now be saved to .opus files. Lotus always offered artwork editing on them, but nothing behind the button could write it. ・Editing a tag on an .opus file no longer discards its artwork. Tags in these files can span several pages, and Lotus only ever read the first one — so saving a title change rewrote the file without whatever came after that boundary, artwork included. ・Repeated tags survive a save. Two artists credited on one track, or a front and back cover, used to collapse into one on every edit. ・The checksum Lotus wrote was wrong. It used the standard zip-style CRC rather than the one the OGG container specifies, so every edited file carried a checksum a strict player can reject. ・Lyrics embedded in .opus files are read. The library Lotus uses for tags cannot open these files at all, so their embedded lyrics were simply invisible. (#124)
• ●Shuffle
• ・Smart Shuffle has been rebuilt. Instead of drawing a random order and hoping it looks spread out, it now deals tracks out like cards — the artist with the most tracks first, one into every other slot — then makes a short pass of random swaps that keeps only the ones that don't make the order worse. Whenever a repeat-free order exists, the deal finds one. The polish that follows scores the queue as a whole, so on compilation-heavy libraries it can occasionally accept a single artist repeat in exchange for better album spacing; measured on randomised test libraries, that happened in under 1% of queues and never cost more than one repeat.
• ●Playback
• ・A file that won't play now says so. Lotus used to move on in silence when it hit something it couldn't decode, which looked identical to the app being broken. You now get a message naming the reason — unsupported format, unreadable file, or an unknown error. This does not add support for any new formats; ALAC and other unsupported codecs still won't play. (#127)
• ●New settings
• ・Ignore single-track albums, at Settings → Music scan. Hides albums holding only one track from the Albums tab. The tracks stay in your library and stay searchable. (#77) ・Reduce lyrics animation, at Settings → Lyrics. Turns off the sweep, glow and zoom on the line being sung; it still brightens as it plays. (#108)
• ●Global search
• ・Search results have the ⋮ menu now. Tracks found through global search were the only ones in the app without it, so loving a song or adding it to a playlist meant closing the search and hunting the track down somewhere else. Thanks to @bxdxnn. (#131)
• ●Languages Untranslated strings fall back to English one by one, so nothing appears blank.
• ・Spanish, contributed by @LunaticWolfOk-py. Covers all but ten strings, which were added during this release cycle. (#99, #138) ・Simplified Chinese, contributed by @MCfool. Covers all but eight, same reason. (#143)
• ●Fixes
• ・Fixed a crash when scrolling a playlist containing the same track twice. Adding a track to a playlist more than once, or importing an M3U that listed one twice, would take the app down as soon as that list scrolled. (#130) ・The playlist title no longer slides under the top bar icons. 1.8.3 fixed this for the buttons at the top of the list; this covers the remaining case, where dragging the bar slowly and releasing it — rather than flicking — parked it at a height where the title still overlapped. Large font sizes made it easier to hit. (#139)

Write a review