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1-bit 1.8, Steady State

1-bit 1.8 is on the App Store. You can point it at music folders on your device instead of copying them in, watch the music's real waveform behind the progress bar, open available album booklets, and find the records where an artist only guests. Additional improvements include optional offline caching, settings tuned to the DAC you own, and the largest fix pass since 1.0.

Updated

1-bit 1.8 is on the App Store. Same URL, new build, free update.

This is the biggest release since 1.0 — 236 commits, 364 files — and yet almost none of it is a new mechanism. Half of those commits are fixes.

What’s new

Your music, where it already livesUntil now, “on-device library” meant files you had copied into 1-bit. If you already had 40 GB of FLAC on the phone, you needed 80. Now you can pick a folder — anywhere on the device or on a drive plugged into the USB-C port — and the app scans and plays it in place. It’s the standard file picker, so iOS grants access to that one folder and asks for no new permission. This feature came straight from an App Store review note on 1.7, which is a nicer origin story than most features get.
A timeline made of dustThe scrubber used to draw fake bars from a seed. Now, for tracks your bridge has analysed, it draws the real peak envelope — and it stopped being a chart. It’s a field of motes shaped by the track’s own loudness, with a playhead bloom that swells with the music. All of it comes from a curve computed on the bridge hours earlier; there is no meter tapping the audio and nothing new on the render thread. Tracks from SMB, a UPnP server, your own folders, or any DSD file keep the old synthetic bars.
Album bookletsLiner notes, finally. When your bridge has a PDF booklet for an album, a small badge appears on the artwork and opens it full-screen — the essay, the credits, the photographs, the bit of the record that never made it into a tag. Albums on a bridge without them look exactly as they did before.
Appears OnAn artist’s page used to show only the records where they got the headline. Now there’s an Appears On section for the ones where they’re a guest, a session player, a “with” credit — and those names turn up in search instead of vanishing because someone else’s name was on the sleeve. This is built entirely from the credits already in your tags, on-device.

The part that’s off by default

1.8 adds two ways for the app to fetch music without being asked: Prefetch upcoming tracks on Wi-Fi pulls down the next few tracks in your queue so a slow link can’t stall you, and Cache smart mixes overnight asks iOS to wake the app and download your Home mixes while you sleep. Both run only on Wi-Fi while the device is charging — never on cellular, never in Low Power Mode. The overnight one is a background task, so iOS decides if it gets a turn at all; it can go days without one.

Turning either on also enables a small automatic cache so recently-played and upcoming tracks start instantly. It lives in its own subtree, reclaims its own space oldest-first, and cannot touch the downloads you chose deliberately. With both toggles off, nothing is ever written to it. And none of this is a new destination: the bytes come from the same bridge or share the app was already streaming from.

And on the bridge side

Bridge 0.1.8 is what makes two of the four features above possible — same v1 wire protocol, everything is added additively.

It serves the peak waveform behind that new timeline, plus R128 loudness and an estimated key and tempo — all decoded offline on your own host with sox, reading the samples and never altering the bytes it later hands your phone. It serves the PDF booklets. And the admin console was rebuilt into five tabs, with Docker down to a single command for NAS and container hosts. If you’d rather not upgrade the bridge, don’t: 1.8 runs fine against an older one — the waveforms and booklets simply don’t appear.

Same audio path

No transcoding. No resampling. No mixer in the path. DSD goes out as DoP to your USB DAC; PCM goes out at the file’s native sample rate. The waveform is a picture drawn from a curve computed hours ago on another machine; a booklet is a PDF; a folder you picked is read where it sits. None of them sit between the file and the DAC. There’s also a new read-only card in Settings → Audio that tells you the settings your particular DAC was tuned for — it advises, and it changes nothing on its own. The bytes that reach your DAC are the bytes in your files. How DSD playback is handled →

The down-to-earth version

If you have 1-bit installed: open the App Store and tap update. Your SMB shares, bridge pairings, folders, and Settings carry over. The waveforms and booklets show up on their own once you’re on a 0.1.8 bridge with analysis on; the offline caching stays off until you go and turn it on. One thing you will notice without asking: the five-icon picker is gone, replaced by a single icon that follows your system appearance — gold in light, teal in dark.

If you’re new: it’s a free download, iPhone or iPad, iOS 26.1 or later. Bring a NAS, a bridge, or just a folder of files on the phone, a USB DAC for DSD, and music you actually like.

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