Two official collaborations land in 4.5: Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War and Harry Potter. Liquid glass is in as a beta, and I rebuilt Now Playing and the lyrics screen. The rest is mostly fixes, a lot of them for songs that wouldn’t stream, stopped halfway through or wouldn’t play after a restart.

Personalisation

• Two official collaborations: Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War and Harry Potter. Each reskins the app, retunes the console and adds six sound profiles, eight themed radio stations, a stackable effects lab and a ranked listening ladder with achievements. That makes nine packs in all, counting the default Voxtrona look.
• Liquid glass (beta). The dock and mini player are real glass that bends and scatters what’s behind it. Every other surface (player controls, cards, sheets) can be switched on one by one in Settings → Liquid glass.
• Background slideshow. Pick several gradients and the background fades from one to the next, every 15 seconds up to every 15 minutes.
• Redesigned menus and Integrations. The header menu has its own look in every pack. Integrations opens on a summary of what’s connected, with a card per service.
• What’s new lives in Settings. It no longer pops up over Home.

Now Playing & mini player

• Rebuilt Now Playing. Three matching pills across the top, redrawn controls, and a seek bar you can tap anywhere or drag. A track still loading shows “Connecting” instead of an empty bar.
• The mini player matches the dock, made of the same glass.

Lyrics

• Lyrics, redesigned. No blur: the song’s own colours sit behind the words, lines are larger with the current one lifted, and the controls sit on their own panel that steps aside as soon as you start reading.
• Faster Spotify lyrics and canvases. One shared lookup now serves both.
• Cleaner lyrics. Auto-generated video captions are no longer passed off as lyrics, and apostrophes and quotes display properly everywhere.

Audio engine

• Spatial audio first. The quality sheet opens on all six profiles (Dolby Atmos, Dirac Live, DTS:X Ultra, Meridian, THX and your face-mapped HRTF), each lit in its own colour. No Lossless needed.
• Volume levelling that holds. Normalisation keeps working through Bluetooth connections and sample-rate changes.
• Pack presets at full strength. Every pack’s signature presets now sound the way they were tuned.
• The console and 3D controller open cleanly, and the console’s Simple and Advanced modes stay tidy.

Playback

• Play works after a restart, from the app, the notification, headphones, the car and the lock screen.
• Fewer tracks that won’t stream. Every install has its own identity, and streams fall back across six client types.
• No more stopping mid-song. Failed streams are refreshed rather than retried against a dead link, and three failures in a row pause instead of skipping through the queue.
• Playlists keep their order when you remove, drag or shuffle tracks.
• Long sessions behave. The endless queue keeps your last 50 tracks, download notifications no longer pile up, and your player cache limit is the one actually used.
• I’ve switched DJ crossfade off until I’ve fixed it. It’s coming back.

Library & discovery

• Home opens instantly on your last feed, then refreshes behind it.
• One tap, one screen. A quick double tap no longer opens a page twice.

Wrapped & analytics

• Archetypes that fit. All eight listener archetypes are scored, so the result is the one that matches you.
• A calmer listening profile. Archetypes fold away behind one row, and headings are tidier.
• Built for bigger screens. Wrapped, the audio console and the quality sheet lay out in columns on tablets, foldables and desktop.

Share

• Instant share sheet. The card is prepared off the main thread, so sharing no longer stalls.

Performance & reliability

• Lighter everywhere. The animated background, mini player, loading shimmers, lyrics and Now Playing now redraw only what moves. Equaliser drags no longer flood the audio hardware.
• Smoother scrolling. Tuned against frame timings measured on a real phone.
• A launch that can’t brick. A bad proxy setting repairs itself instead of stopping the app from opening.
• No freeze on exit, and fewer crashes, including from background playback and a damaged cache.