Lotus

Releases

• Sep 21, 2026 1.9.1-community
  > **Community fork of [Lotus](https://github.com/dn0ne/lotus).** See the [README](https://github.com/Bjorn99/lotus/blob/master/README.md#what-sets-this-fork-apart) for the cumulative list of improvements this fork carries over the upstream. > > **Which APK do I pick?** If you're not sure, download `lotus-*-universal-release.apk` — it works on any phone. Otherwise pick the one matching your CPU architecture (`arm64-v8a` covers most modern phones). Verify the download against `SHA256SUMS.txt`. ## 1.9.1 Swipe the album art to change track. Lotus now speaks Turkish in full and French in part, and four fixes land, including wrong times on tracks over an hour and the player's action row hiding behind the artwork on small screens. ### Added

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  - **Swipe the album art to change track.** In the expanded player, drag the artwork sideways: left for the next track, right for the previous one. Right does exactly what the skip-back button does, so with "jump to beginning" on — which is the default — swiping right more than three seconds into a track restarts that track rather than going back; swipe right again from the start to reach the previous track. A drag has to travel about 50dp before it counts, and any drag with a clear sideways component counts, including a diagonal one. Works in landscape too, and mirrors in right-to-left layouts. Contributed by @bxdxnn. (#66) ### Languages Untranslated strings fall back to English one by one, so nothing appears blank. - **Turkish**, contributed by [@KerimDemirkaynak](https://github.com/KerimDemirkaynak). Complete — all 362 strings. (#149, #156) - **French**, contributed by Mickaël Binos. 122 of 362 strings so far, and growing as translation continues. (#156) ### Fixed - **Tracks longer than an hour showed a wrong time.** The player counted minutes from the start of the track instead of from the start of the hour, while still showing an hours field beside them — so a six-hour mixtape read `06:372:49` instead of `6:12:49`, and the elapsed time beside it was wrong the same way. Anything under an hour was always correct. (#159) - **Track info shows hours for long tracks.** The duration there was minutes and seconds only, so the same mixtape read `372:49`. It now reads `6:12:49`, matching the player. - **Fixed a crash that could close the app at startup.** Lotus tints itself from the colours in the current track's artwork. When that colour extraction came back empty — which it can — the app shut down instead of quietly falling back to its normal colours. It now falls back. - **The player's top row of buttons was invisible on small screens.** Shuffle and repeat, the queue, lyrics, the sleep timer and the track menu were being drawn behind the album art instead of above it, so on a short screen they disappeared entirely — and because they were still there, tapping the top of the artwork could silently change the repeat mode or open the queue. The artwork now shrinks to make room. This affected any short screen, not only the phone it was reported on. (#125)
• Aug 15, 2026 1.9.0-community
  > **Community fork of [Lotus](https://github.com/dn0ne/lotus).** See the [README](https://github.com/Bjorn99/lotus/blob/master/README.md#what-sets-this-fork-apart) for the cumulative list of improvements this fork carries over the upstream. > > **Which APK do I pick?** If you're not sure, download `lotus-*-universal-release.apk` — it works on any phone. Otherwise pick the one matching your CPU architecture (`arm64-v8a` covers most modern phones). Verify the download against `SHA256SUMS.txt`. ## 1.9.0 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

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  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](https://github.com/bxdxnn). (#131) ### Languages Untranslated strings fall back to English one by one, so nothing appears blank. - **Spanish**, contributed by [@LunaticWolfOk-py](https://github.com/LunaticWolfOk-py). Covers all but ten strings, which were added during this release cycle. (#99, #138) - **Simplified Chinese**, contributed by [@MCfool](https://github.com/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)