Embeat — a native, music-only player for Emby (gapless, DLNA, offline)

[vdatanet 1637]

Hi everyone,

I'm the developer of Embeat, a native iOS music player for Emby, and it just went live on the App Store today. Full disclosure up front: it's my own app and it's a paid subscription (€9.99/year, one month free) — I'd rather say that in the first paragraph than bury it.

Why I built it

I have a large, carefully tagged FLAC/ALAC collection on my own server, and I kept running into the same thing: the general-purpose media-center apps treat music as a second-class citizen. What I wanted was the Plexamp-style experience — but for Emby. Reading this forum, it turns out I'm far from the only one who's been asking for that, so I built it.

Embeat does music and nothing else. No video, no photos, no library management. It talks straight to your server; there is no cloud service of mine in the middle.

What it does

• Gapless playback — lossless direct play of FLAC and ALAC, with no audible gap between tracks on live albums and continuous mixes.
• HLS/AAC on mobile — when the network gets shaky, the server transcodes to adaptive HLS/AAC. Instant seek, and it recovers from dropouts without skipping the track.
• Offline downloads — tracks, albums or whole playlists onto the device, playable with the server unreachable. Original quality or AAC to save space, with a screen to see and clear what you've got stored.
• Embeat Connect (DLNA/UPnP) — automatic discovery of renderers on your network, then playback, volume and position control from the phone.
• Playlist management — create, rename, delete, add/remove tracks and reorder. Written back to the server.
• Library browsing — artists, albums, tracks, genres and playlists, as a list or a grid per collection type, with sorting (name, date added, year, artist) and filters (genre, favorites).
• Long-press context menu — play next, add to queue, add to a playlist, start a radio, jump to album/artist, toggle favorite.
• Editable queue, persistent shuffle/repeat, customizable home carousels, global search grouped by type.
• Multi-server — add as many servers as you like and switch between them without logging in again.
• Siri — "Play <artist> on Embeat" via App Intents.
• Lock screen / Control Center artwork and controls, background playback, and playback reporting to the server so recently played, play counts and now playing stay correct.
• Interface in English, Catalan and Spanish, following the system language.

Requirements and honest caveats

• iPhone, iOS 18.4 or later. No iPad-specific layout yet, no CarPlay yet.
• No Android version yet. It's actively in development — the app is built on a shared Kotlin Multiplatform core, so all the server, library and playback logic is already cross-platform. I'm not going to promise a date.
• Not there yet: lyrics, scrobbling to Last.fm/ListenBrainz, crossfade, ReplayGain, AirPlay/Chromecast, and automatic server discovery on the LAN (you enter the server URL manually the first time).
• It also works with Jellyfin, since the two share an API surface. I mention it for completeness, not to start anything — most of the driver code is common, with the handful of genuine endpoint differences verified against real servers of both kinds.

Privacy

Embeat only talks to your server. Credentials are stored encrypted in the device Keychain. No analytics, no tracking, no account with me — the App Store handles the subscription and I never see your library.

Links

• App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/embeat/id6788410988
• Site (features, pricing, FAQ, privacy policy and terms): https://embeat.media

I'd genuinely like feedback from people running big libraries — that's where the interesting edge cases live (odd tag layouts, mixed sample rates, huge playlists, slow remote connections). Bug reports and feature requests are welcome here or by email, and I read everything.

Thanks to the Emby team and this community — the server does the hard part.

Not affiliated with or endorsed by Emby. Emby is a trademark of its respective owner.

Edited 1 hour ago by vdatanet

[ebr 16554]

5 hours ago, vdatanet said:

no CarPlay yet

Planned?

[vdatanet 1637]

16 minutes ago, ebr said:

Planned?

Thanks for the suggestion! CarPlay is planned — I'm just wrapping up the Android version first, and it's almost done. CarPlay will follow shortly after.

[vdatanet 1637]

Update — version 1.1.0 is out: Embeat is now native on iPad

Quick recap for anyone landing on this thread for the first time: Embeat is a native iOS
music-only player for Emby — gapless FLAC/ALAC direct play, offline downloads, DLNA, playlist
management. €9.99/year, one month free. It talks straight to your server, with nothing of mine
in the middle.

Apple approved 1.1.0 today and it's rolling out now.

On iPad (the point of this release)

- A sidebar instead of the tab bar: Home, Artists, Albums, Songs, Genres and Playlists, always
  in view.
- Two panes when there's room — the list on the left, the detail on the right, without losing
  your place.
- Two-column player, with the full editable queue beside it.
- Search shows the results and the selected item at the same time.
- Rotating the device keeps both your selection and your place in the list.

And for everyone, iPhone included

- Tapping a song in Songs, on Home or in search now plays it, with the queue taken from that
  same list.
- Shuffle in the playlist detail and in Songs now runs across the whole library rather than
  just what's loaded.
- New playlists appear under Playlists without pulling to refresh.
- Gone: the double back arrow in Genres and Playlists.
- Home sections no longer disappear after you reorder them.

Requirements are unchanged: iPhone or iPad, iOS/iPadOS 18.4 or later.

What's next

I had the audio engine independently audited last week and it turned up a handful of genuine
playback bugs: a brief dropout at the start of a track, failures on cellular data, opens that
never completed, a pause that could get stuck on "loading", and FLAC seeking that made the
progress bar lie. Those are fixed and going through TestFlight now, so the next update is
mostly playback reliability.

Also worth saying here, since it's the thing people have asked for most since launch: Apple has
granted me the CarPlay entitlement, so it's no longer blocked on their side. Nothing is built
yet and I'm not going to promise a date, but it's coming. Android is still in development and
not out.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/embeat/id6788410988
Site: https://www.embeat.media
Feedback and bug reports: here or joan@vdata.net — I read everything.

Thanks again to everyone who tried it and wrote in; several of the iPhone fixes above came
straight from this thread.

Edited 1 hour ago by vdatanet