Happy new year everyone! 🎉

As new year's gift, Gramophone now fully supports ReplayGain in all popular tag formats. (*except MP3 APE)

You can choose whether to use DRC or reduce volume, can adjust volume, and there's a Smart mode to automatically switch between Track and Album mode.

For those unaware, ReplayGain is a volume normalization scheme that allows you to have all songs at the same volume. You won't need to change your headphone volume anymore when switching between Pop and Classical music in Shuffle :)

To get started, simply use a ReplayGain scanner to scan your files, then enable it in Gramophone Audio settings.

This feature will be available in the next release, and is available today in the CI/alpha builds you can get via our chat @FoedusDiscussion

As some of you might already noticed, Accord has once again revived under the help of @markakash who made all these recent gorgeous changes. However, we saw some users already started asking for bug fixes in our group with homebrew accord 2 packages and developers already trying to open pull requests on active branches. Please remain calm as Accord 2 is far from final release, so just wait patiently!

Accord 2 alpha builds are now pinned in our chat @FoedusDiscussion

Please note, it's alpha and as such it doesn't have features such as lyrics or home page or settings working. But it plays music and you can try it and give feedback today!

There's still a lot to be said about Google's developer verification.

The campaign at https://keepandroidopen.org/en/ already addresses many fundamental key points (and gives context if you haven't heard it before). Some technical implementation questions can found at https://t.me/TadiBlog/845 (I encourage you to ask Google's community outreach they've specifically invested in due to this campaign by hiring Mishaal Rahman - apparently to limit PR damage?).

But I would like to say two things about it myself:

Firstly, I'm tired of companies using security as a pretext to grab control. The entire concept of having passports as identity verification and requiring registration in advance, yet not scanning binaries, means the only thing this can achieve is to punish developers after an incident happens. Malicious actors have been buying Play Console accounts for years (I already cannot count how many sketchy offers I got per email) and ask people on Fiverr to create accounts for them, they will have no problem registering anonymously and creating new accounts if old ones get banned.

But real developers will be threatened by Google's problem with 1. false positive bans 2. false positive play TOS violation detections 3. being unable to talk to a human in such cases, and 4. long-standing "ban by association" policy which prevents them to use a different account or make new ones. Google can shut down honest app developers with one wrong decision by their robot (or because said developer does something they don't want, anyone know NewPipe?), and malicious actors can continue to distribute malware with only slightly more effort.

Secondly, if Google goes through with it as announced, it still won't be the end of Gramophone. Both Google Play builds (that can be installed without doing their weird advanced flow, but with a Google backdoor due to Play App Signing) and F-Droid builds (reproducible and developer-signed, secure) will stay available. Whether I will register the F-Droid signing key on Google's dashboard, allowing installation of these builds on Google certified Android devices, is not yet decided though, so there may or may not be an interruption to updates if you don't enable the "advanced flow" (the remedy would be installing from Google Play).

BUT: Gramophone is only in this position thanks to the support of someone nice who offered to register at Google Play for us. Not every project has this privilege. It's not okay what Google is doing, constantly making Android worse for users and developers both.

Remember to support alternative app stores like F-Droid, offering trusted reproducible developer-signed builds.

Download Gramophone from F-Droid today: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.akanework.gramophone

Good news came in per email.

Gramophone's Play Store version couldn't be automatically verified because it doesn't meet the 50% signing key threshold (it's at 5.89k active installs at the moment).

(Note that I can manually verify it, that's not causing any problems. I own the signing keys after all. I currently just decided to wait it out, though.)

From this we can conclude that there are at least another 5.89k active installs of Gramophone from F-Droid/GitHub/IzzyOnDroid/Telegram even on phones that have Google Play installed, which I consider to be a good thing ;)

(And yes, Google reports what non-Play apps you have installed to their server, and they have always done so.)

[Announcements]: Sorry for the long wait! Please enjoy the update. Expect a hotfix to follow soon (just based on experience). Also do note this is likely the last or second last release that supports Android 5.x, and future releases will drop support for them.

- Playlist editing
- Favourite songs
- New lyrics UI with word-synced lyrics (+ parse ID3 SYLT lyrics)
- ReplayGain 2.0 support
- Pure dark theme
- Folder whitelist
- ALAC decoder
- Playback speed
- Redesigned queue and sleep timer
- Fix a lot of crashes and bugs

Bug fixes

Bug fixes

Tapetum 0.1.0
• Initialize project
• Add refract style
#Tapetum

It doesn't seem like Google intends to stop with Developer Verification, so I went ahead and submitted a request for verification, which got accepted.

What this means for you:
- The Google Play version of Gramophone is now verified, and hence will continue to be available in Google Play beyond the September 30 deadline. It can be installed without advanced flow.
- The F-Droid/GitHub/IzzyOnDroid/Telegram version of Gramophone is NOT verified, and will require enabling advanced flow to continue updating or installing. However, it will also continue to be available for users who don't mind using advanced flow, or have a degoogled device.
- Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand: Starting September 30, 2026, Advanced flow must be enabled to continue updating or installing F-Droid/GitHub/IzzyOnDroid/Telegram builds.
- Other countries: Advanced flow must be enabled in 2027 (exact deadline to be announced by Google) to continue updating or installing F-Droid/GitHub/IzzyOnDroid/Telegram builds.

Edit: and because that wasn't clear from the post so far - I personally recommend to use the F-Droid builds, and enable the advanced flow.

We're super glad to announce that United Software is now three years old! We have been through a lot in the past 3 years and the family tree for our softwares is getting stronger and stronger! Just recently we adopted a music player as one of our new members, XMusic.

As a celebration, we're giving away postcards to known developers/participants in our group and lucky followers in our channel! We will send 30 carefully designed postcards in total to our beloved users. (Known members not included. If you want one just PM @AlmightyAkane and Nick) The event will take place on 1st of October along with our long behold Gramophone Material Design 3 Expressive redesign! Stay tuned to find out.

Again, thank you for supporting Free and Open-Source Software and Thank all of our users and contributors for staying with us!