Media3 marks a progressive stream live when the data source reports no length and the extractor no duration, and a live item makes the media session publish PLAYBACK_POSITION_UNKNOWN, so the notification progress never advances even though the item carries the library duration. The app only declares a stream length for a transcode of a track that has one in a length-estimable format (`declaredStreamLength`), so a chunked response stays live for an Opus/Ogg/Vorbis transcode (a length estimate breaks the end-seek they rely on), for a transcode of a track whose library duration is missing, and for a direct play the server does not give a Content-Length. The now playing screen shows progress in all of those because it falls back to the metadata duration; the notification had nothing to advance. Wrap the ExoPlayer in a ForwardingPlayer that reports an item with a declared duration as finite. The session then publishes the real position and the metadata duration, so the notification shows progress for every unknown-length stream, not just Opus. The stream is still not seekable; only the reported liveness changes.
subtracks
subtracks is an open source Android client for Subsonic-compatible servers (Navidrome, gonic, LMS, Nextcloud Music and more). It is written natively in Kotlin and Jetpack Compose and gives you clean, convenient access to your music in the style of a modern media player.
Screenshots
Download
See signing/README.md for the fingerprints and the commands to verify a download.
Features
- Large Libraries: Built for very large libraries, from syncing the whole collection to playing playlists with thousands of tracks.
- Downloads: Song and bulk downloads, with download quality (encoding, bitrate) and metered-connection settings.
- Offline Mode: Stars, scrobbles and play counts queue up while you're offline and sync back to the server when you're online again.
- Artwork-first: Album and artist art everywhere, shown full-resolution in the detail and now playing views.
- Adaptive Theming: Colours drawn from the current song's artwork.
- Search: Fast search across the whole library, with per-list sort and filter controls.
- Playback: Gapless playback, an editable queue you can reorder and jump through, plus loop and shuffle modes.
- Up Next: Add items into the currently playing queue without rewriting it.
- Multiple Servers: Connect several servers and switch between them quickly.
- Stream Quality: Bitrate and format settings for Wi-Fi and mobile, with automatic switching.
- System Controls: Media notification and headset/Bluetooth controls.
Building
The project's entire toolchain is provided by a Nix flake. The default devshell provides JDK, Gradle and the Android SDK, so there is nothing to install by hand.
Therefore, to get started, you'll need to install Nix. I prefer Lix.
nix develop
gradle :app:assembleDebug
Test, lint and screenshot commands, plus the integration harness, are documented in AGENTS.md. The architecture is described in docs/architecture.md.
Contributing
The GitHub repository austinried/subtracks is a mirror of the repo hosted on my personal (private) code forge that syncs whenever I commit to it.
Bug reports and feature requests are accepted on GitHub, as well as pull requests, but:
- A well-crafted issue with clear reproduction and logs for bugs or mock-ups and use case details for features is preferred over a pull request
- Pull requests will be pulled in as patches to my code forge and then synced back (you'll still be the author, I'll be shown as the committer)
Translations
Want to see subtracks in your language? Visit the project on Weblate to help!
AI usage disclosure
This project contains code and documentation generated by LLM, which is created via human prompting, iteration and review. The current native rewrite is based on two (and a half) other iterations of this project that I coded by hand, so the architecture and other decisions behind that are all still coming from me.
License
subtracks is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0. It has no ads and no telemetry, and uses only free/libre dependencies.







