liquidWave is now on Google Play (closed testing) — looking for testers

[kaj 343]

Hi all

Some of you may remember my earlier post about liquidWave, the self-hosted "sonic analysis" layer for Emby I've been building, plus its Android player:

There's been a lot of work on it since — and it's now on Google Play in closed testing. I'm looking for testers.

The idea: a small service you run yourself listens to your library once and learns what each track actually *sounds* like — not genre tags — which powers:

- Sonic Mixes — auto-curated mixes grouped by how your music really sounds, refreshable, save as a real Emby playlist
- Track Radio & Similar — an endless queue from any track, or tracks/artists/albums that genuinely sound alike
- Sonic Adventure — pick a start and end track, it builds a journey that morphs between them
- Artist Mix Creator — pick a few artists, it suggests sonically similar ones, builds a cross-artist mix

It's also a complete Emby music and audiobook player: crossfade that trims silent intros/outros rather than blending dead air, a 10-band EQ, offline downloads with durable resume, Android Auto, a home-screen widget, Google Cast, and a browser web app for non-Android devices.

Audiobooks are a first-class citizen here, not an afterthought — chapter-aware browsing and resume (it picks up at the right chapter and position, not just the start of a file), variable playback speed, and a sleep timer. They download for offline listening too, and still resume in the right place when you come back.

Everything runs on your own hardware. No account, no cloud service, no ads, no analytics, no telemetry.

You need Emby 4.8+. The app on its own is a fully capable Emby player in about five minutes with no backend at all; the sonic features need the small self-hosted service alongside your server.

To join the test (Google requires both steps, sorry — the group is how Play controls access):

1. Join the group: https://groups.google.com/g/liquidwave-testers
2. Then open https://play.google.com/apps/testing/guru.liquid.embysonic and hit "Become a tester"

After that it installs from Play like any other app and updates automatically.

If you're able to, please join through Play rather than sideloading the APK — Google needs 12 testers installed via Play for 14 continuous days before an app can go public, so those are the installs that count. Sideloading works fine and is still supported, it just doesn't help get it over that line.

Full details and the setup guide: https://playliquidwave.com

Genuinely a beta, but been my daily driver for over a month now — actively developed, there will be rough edges, and I'd rather hear about them. Feedback of any kind very welcome, here or in the app's issue tracker.

Thanks for reading

Edited 10 minutes ago by kaj