What's new

Every release of BitDek, in plain language. New features, improvements, and fixes, with the reasoning behind them.

[1.3.4] - 2026-08-11

Changed

The Beatles now file under B. Artists, albums, and tracks sort past leading articles like The, A, and An. The Rolling Stones sit under R, where you would look for them. The article stays on screen and only the filing position changes.
Your library’s order changes on update day if your files carry no sort tags. Nothing moved and nothing was lost. Prefer strict alphabetical order? Turn off Ignore Articles When Sorting in Settings under Library.
Sort tags in your music always win, used exactly as written. A sort tag set to match the display name keeps its article in place, so you can opt any artist or album out one at a time.
A brief one-time library update runs on first launch after this version. A small notice shows its progress, and you can keep using the app or dismiss the notice while it finishes.
Cleaner navigation bar. The gradient behind it now stays inside the bar instead of bleeding into the content below.
Softer player surfaces. A gentler mini player glow and a subtler tab bar scrim, in both light and dark mode.

Fixed

Sort tags in M4A, AAC, and ALAC files now work. Reported by a customer with a classical library. The iTunes sort fields were ignored at import, so collections in Apple’s own formats never sorted by them even though the same tags worked for MP3 and FLAC.
The Import screen no longer overstates your storage. A 1 TB iPhone could show “2 TB Total Capacity” because the label always rounded up to the next size tier. Only the label was wrong, and the available-space math was always right.
Sort names arriving on a later import now fill in artists that were first imported from untagged files.

[1.3.3] - 2026-08-04

Changed

Repeat All stays on until you turn it off. Set it once and every album or playlist you play afterward keeps looping, through queue ejects, new music, and app restarts. Repeat One still applies only in the moment. Skipping away or starting a new queue turns it off, as before.
Smoother scrolling. Album grids, artist pages, and track lists draw their artwork and shadows more efficiently, with the biggest gains on 120Hz displays.
A banner that matches your theme. The import progress banner now follows your chosen theme in light and dark mode.

Fixed

Same-title albums stay separate. Two recordings of the same symphony by different orchestras used to merge into a single album with their tracks mixed together. They now import as separate albums, whether they arrive in the same import or months apart. Setting the Album Artist tag in your files guarantees the separation, even when both albums sit in folders with the same name.
Shuffle comes back on. Reopening the app with a shuffled queue brought back the shuffled order while the shuffle button showed off, so tapping it re-shuffled instead of un-shuffling. Turning shuffle off after a restore now returns the queue to its true original order, and a restored queue reshuffles when Repeat All loops it back to the start.
Shuffle saves the moment you toggle it. Your choice survives even a sudden app termination. It still resets when you eject the queue or play something new.

[1.3.2] - 2026-07-30

Changed

Disconnecting pauses your music. Put your headphones away, power off a Bluetooth speaker, or shut off the car, and BitDek pauses instead of continuing loudly through the iPhone speaker. Press play and it picks up at the same spot. Switching outputs yourself, like choosing the speaker from the AirPlay menu, keeps playing as always.
Albums that repeat a track import completely. A piece that opens and closes a record, like “O Fortuna” on Carmina Burana, was treated as a duplicate the second time and skipped. BitDek now recognizes it by its position on the album and keeps both. Re-importing an album you already own still skips true duplicates.

Fixed

Reopening is faster and cleaner. Your music restores paused right at your saved spot, with no play button flicker and no brief replay of the track start. Cold starts with a long queue reach the player sooner.
Sound after an interruption. Music interrupted by a timer or alarm now resumes with audio when you press play, instead of showing a playing screen with nothing coming out of it.

[1.3.1] - 2026-07-21

Fixed

Picking up where you left off now works exactly as it should.

Your place is saved as you listen. Playback position now records on pause, track changes, seeks, and periodically during playback, not only when you leave the app. Come back after iOS has closed BitDek in the background and you resume where you actually stopped.
The mini player always returns. Relaunching after backgrounding with the full player open no longer leaves an active queue with no player on screen.
No more frozen scrub bar. Starting new music after a restored session left the scrub bar and timestamp stuck, and early skips re-froze them at 0:00. Both fixed.
Timestamps that make sense. Returning to the app and pressing play no longer jumps the time forward by however long you were away. At worst it showed hours beyond the length of the track.
Output switches keep the music going. Connecting AirPods mid-song, or changing outputs any other way, no longer strands playback paused.
Play responds right away. Tapping play in the first seconds after reopening the app did nothing, or restarted the track from the beginning with a frozen progress bar. It now resumes from where you left off.

[1.3.0] - 2026-07-08

Added

A 10-band equalizer. Shape your sound with ten bands from 31 Hz to 16 kHz, adjustable in 0.1 dB steps up to ±12 dB. The sliders sit right on a live curve that draws your combined filter shape as you drag.
Your presets, not ours. Save, rename, reload, or delete your own equalizer presets. BitDek ships no canned genre presets. You know what your ears want.
Automatic headroom. Boost as many bands as you like. BitDek calculates the trim needed to keep the signal from clipping, so your adjustments never distort. A Manual mode lets you set the trim yourself.
Lossless passthrough stays lossless. The equalizer is off by default, and off means untouched. Your files pass through sample-identical, exactly as they always have. Engage it and the Audio Quality Overlay adds a Processing node with a miniature response curve, so you always know what is touching your audio.
Import from the Music app. The music you own in Apple’s Music app can now come straight into BitDek. iTunes purchases and downloaded iTunes Match tracks copy over on your device. No computer involved. Lossless files copy without re-encoding, and the Import Summary notes any MP3s converted to AAC.
Choose exactly what comes over. A full-screen picker lists your artists, albums, and tracks with Select All and per-item checkboxes. Tracks still in iCloud show a cloud icon and stay unselectable until you download them in the Music app. A checkmark always means the complete set will import. Download a track in the Music app, come back, and the picker updates on its own.
Only the music you own. Apple Music subscription tracks are protected, and BitDek leaves them alone. Ownership is the whole point.
Album versions, understood. Import a remaster or a different format of an album you already own and BitDek files it as a version inside the album group. True duplicates, same album, same format, same edition, get skipped and listed in the Import Summary. Tracks you already imported from the Music app skip instantly on a second pass.

Changed

Playback starts without the stall. Audio setup used to block the interface for up to a second on Bluetooth, at cold launch, and on output changes. It now runs in the background, and playback commands queue in strict order so nothing gets lost mid-switch.
Storage numbers that match Settings. Device Storage on the Import Music screen now reads the way iOS Settings and Finder do. Available space includes what the system can reclaim on demand, every value uses decimal units, and Total Capacity shows the size on the box. 256 GB, not 255.98.
Active buttons look active. The equalizer and AirPlay buttons in the full player now show the same soft highlight the loop and shuffle buttons use. AirPlay lights up whenever your audio routes wirelessly.

Fixed

Visualizers now show the truth. Bars labeled for bass were displaying midrange content, a bug in the frequency analysis all four visualizers share. Each bar now averages the frequencies its label actually spans, and the whole display reacts to the new equalizer in real time.
Ready for iOS 27. On the iOS 27 beta, some listeners hit a blank library at launch or a player missing its artwork. We traced the bug to its root and fixed it there, verified on the beta, with nothing changed on iOS 26.
End of the queue, end of the player. With repeat off, finishing the last track used to leave the player on screen at 0:00. It now closes the queue and dismisses itself, the same as tapping eject.
Bitrate readings you can trust. Track bitrates now measure the audio stream itself instead of estimating from file size, so embedded cover art no longer inflates the number. Applies to newly imported tracks.
Two crashes gone. Scrubbing to the very start of a playing track no longer crashes. Neither does pressing play in the middle of an output change, right after a Bluetooth switch, for example.
Import Summary math. The skipped-files headline now counts every skip, matching the list below it.

[1.2.3] - 2026-04-09

Added

Filter by era. A new Release Date section in the library filter narrows Albums, Tracks, Artists, and Playlists by decade or by any of the last five years. Reissues file under their original era, so the 50th Anniversary edition of Dark Side of the Moon filters as 1973, not 2023. Combine buckets freely, and only eras present in your collection appear.

Fixed

Shuffle crash. Tapping Shuffle on the Albums screen could crash the app. Fixed.

[1.2.2] - 2026-03-11

Added

Siri arrives. Say “Hey Siri, play Miles Davis in BitDek” and it happens. Artists, albums, songs, playlists, and genres all work by voice, along with resume and shuffle.
Siri keeps current. Newly imported artists are recognized right away, and Siri learns that the name is pronounced “bit deck.”
Siri in Settings. A new Settings row shows whether Siri is enabled and takes you to the right place to change it. BitDek asks for permission after your first import, once there is a library worth talking to.

[1.2.1] - 2026-03-04

Added

A CarPlay Home tab. Recently Played and Recently Added grids greet you in the car, with a Resume item to pick up where you left off.
CarPlay, faster. The tab bar now appears instantly and content fills in progressively. The long blank screen at launch is gone.
Play and Shuffle up top. Albums, artists, and playlists on CarPlay gained Play and Shuffle buttons. Album pages got a proper header, classical works group by movement, and multi-disc albums show disc headers.
Start fresh. Settings > Storage can now delete all music or all playlists. You type DELETE before anything irreversible happens.

Changed

Bit-Perfect is now Lossless Passthrough. iOS never gives an app exclusive access to the audio hardware, so true bit-perfect output does not exist on iPhone. What BitDek does is preserve your file’s native sample rate with no resampling. The new badge says exactly that. Honesty over hype.
Onboarding, trimmed. Three screens with less to read. Formats and import methods in one place, pricing up front.
A better empty library. Zero tracks now shows the BitDek logo, a welcome, and one clear Import Music button instead of an empty list.

Fixed

Bluetooth, solid. Switching between Bluetooth devices mid-listen no longer stops playback at the end of a track, and the gaps between tracks in gapless albums over Bluetooth are gone.
Play state stays honest. The play button now updates correctly after another app interrupts your audio.
CarPlay in the dark. Icons and track numbers now adapt to your car display’s light and dark appearance.
Widescreen CarPlay layout. Connecting a widescreen car display no longer distorts the mini player and full-screen player on your phone.
The Queue tab shows up. Opening BitDek in the car before opening it on your phone no longer hides the Queue tab on the phone.

[1.2.0] - 2026-02-17

Added

BitDek in your car. Full CarPlay support. Browse artists, albums, playlists, and songs, control playback from Now Playing with shuffle and repeat, and jump around the Up Next queue. Long lists get A-Z quick navigation.

[1.1.11] - 2026-02-16

Fixed

Big text, intact layout. BitDek now holds its layout at accessibility text sizes, capped at the point where layouts break. Display Zoom no longer collapses grids to a single column or clips the player controls, and text size changes now apply live instead of after a restart.

[1.1.10] - 2026-02-10

Added

Visualizers, edge to edge. Double-tap, long-press, or pinch the visualizer to take it fullscreen. All four pages stay swipeable. Tap or pinch to come back.
Offer codes. Redeem a promotional code straight from the Upgrade sheet.

Fixed

Visualizers going dark. Long listening sessions could blank the visualizers until a restart. Fixed, along with a stutter under heavy interface updates.

[1.1.9] - 2026-02-06

Added

Source folders know their status. A folder on a disconnected SSD or an offline NAS now shows as Unavailable. Availability rechecks every few seconds and again the moment you return to the app.
Import browsing, immediate. The selective import browser now scans in the background and shows results as they arrive. Folders you expand jump to the front of the line. Import stays disabled until every selected folder finishes scanning, so nothing imports half-counted.

[1.1.8] - 2026-02-02

Fixed

Mini player reliability. Four separate state bugs could hide the mini player after returning from the background. All fixed.
AirPods manners. Stem squeeze now toggles play and pause, and Control Center shows the right state after your AirPods disconnect.

[1.1.7] - 2026-01-28

Liftoff. BitDek’s first App Store release.