NaviBeat · iOS 18+
Stream your self-hosted music library from Navidrome, Airsonic, Gonic, or any OpenSubsonic-compatible server, on the phone in your pocket. Tab bar, full-screen Now Playing, time-synced lyrics, Up Next queue, long-press sleep timer and AutoMix. One $5.99 Universal Purchase covers every Apple device.
iOS 18+
iPhone XS/XR and later
0 SDKs
No analytics. No trackers.
Full screen
Now Playing · with lyrics
$5.99 once
Universal Purchase · all Apple devices
The short answer
01 / Offline
Pin a song, an album, a playlist, or an entire artist. Artwork and metadata come down with the audio, so the whole library browses offline, not just plays. An LRU cache with a size limit you set manages the space for you. Prefer Downloaded Music plays the local file even when you are online, so a weak signal never touches your listening. The download queue shows live speed, transfer history, and one-tap retry.
02 / CarPlay
CarPlay is included in the same purchase, with your library, playlists, downloads, and Now Playing controls on the car screen. Say play and the name of an artist, album, song, or playlist in any of the app's 12 languages: the search resolves against your own library, not a streaming catalog, and when nothing matches it shows you exactly what it heard instead of failing silently.
03 / Cellular
Streaming quality is set separately for Wi-Fi and for cellular, across 15 tiers (Original, Opus 320 down to 64, AAC 320 down to 96, MP3 320 down to 128). Auto sends the original file on Wi-Fi and a light Opus transcode on cellular, so the buffer stays ahead of the playhead on a train, and Server decides hands the choice to the transcoding profile you set on your own Navidrome. Downloads have their own quality setting, separate from both. But the tiers are the smaller half. On mobile data NaviBeat downloads the next two tracks in your queue in full while the current one plays, then plays them from the local file. A cell-tower handover, a dropped connection or a slow server-side transcode cannot restart or stall a song that is already on disk. When the server is transcoding, NaviBeat downloads your first track whole before it starts, so that one costs a short wait instead of a restart; from the second track of a session onward the network is no longer in the playback path. The cache is a rolling 300 MB, cleans itself oldest first, never duplicates your real downloads, and is not used on Wi-Fi. That matters because the track jumps back to the beginning while driving problem is universal in this ecosystem and is not really a client bug: a server transcoding on the fly answers without a content length and ignores range requests, so a client that loses the connection can only refetch from the start. Removing the network from the path is the only complete fix. Seeking inside transcoded streams is accurate, and playback recovers by itself if iOS resets its audio service or if you come back from a dead-signal stretch.
04 / Audio quality
A selectable high-fidelity playback engine with a 10-band equalizer and presets. ReplayGain (track, album, or automatic) so a shuffle across a mixed library does not swing 10 dB between songs. Gapless playback, so live albums and DJ mixes run through without a hole. Your server does the transcoding, in the format and bitrate you choose, or none at all.
In the beta right now
All of this is built and in testers’ hands through TestFlight today, and it reaches the App Store in the next release. Anyone can join the beta, and it is free.
01 / Offline
With no connection you still get the real Artists, Albums, Songs and Playlists screens, sorts and filters and all, read from the phone. Anything you have not downloaded is greyed out rather than hidden. Offline Mode is a switch at the top of Library, and NaviBeat flips it for you when the server stops answering and back when it returns. Offline Library can keep the whole collection downloaded on its own: choose how often it checks, hold it to Wi-Fi, and set a floor of free space it will not cross.
02 / CarPlay
The CarPlay home screen now shows the same shelves the phone does, drawn as rows of artwork: Pick up where you left off, Quick Play, NaviBeat Mixes, Made for You, your playlists, Most Played, Recently Added and more, in an order you arrange from the phone. Play All and Shuffle All are named rows at the top of album, artist and playlist lists. Search hands the typing back to your phone, keeps your recent searches, and primes voice recognition with the names in your own library. And the car keeps the screen you left through a switch from Wi-Fi to cellular and through unplugging and plugging back in.
03 / Continuity
Home shows what is playing on your iPad, Mac or Apple TV with a live position. One tap takes it over from the exact second, and the device you left pauses itself instead of playing to an empty room.
04 / Playback
When a stream is cut short on cellular or inside a tunnel, NaviBeat notices and picks the song back up at the second it stopped instead of skipping ahead. FLAC starts about nine times faster on a cold stream, gapless now works for ALAC as well, and playback resumes properly after a phone call, in the car or out of it.
05 / Smart Playlists
Rules over rating, genre, year, play count, date added, format, duration, even membership of another playlist, combined with ALL or ANY and sorted six ways including a random you can re-roll. The results stay current on their own. Save Snapshot writes a real playlist onto your server so your other clients see it too, and your definitions follow you to your other Apple devices.
06 / Speakers
Hand a track to a UPnP or DLNA speaker or receiver on your own network, with transport, position and volume from the app. Adding one by address is the path that always works; automatic discovery depends on what a given box announces and on a multicast permission Apple has not granted, so reach for the address field first.
07 / Now Playing
Turn the phone on its side on any iPhone and the whole player rearranges so every control fits on one screen. Title, artist and album each get a line, a long one scrolls instead of being cut off, and you can put the cover first or the text first. An optional Track 3 of 11 line tells you where you are in the album.
08 / Finding things
Type a line you remember and NaviBeat finds the song, showing the lyric that matched underneath it. The scope is narrow and we would rather say so: it works over songs you have downloaded, because a Navidrome search index does not contain lyrics. Separately, Find in Spotlight puts your artists and albums in the system search sheet, and an Appears On shelf on an artist page collects the albums they only guest on.
09 / Shortcuts and NFC
A Play Album action in Shortcuts, with an album picker and a shuffle flag, alongside the transport actions and Play Playlist. The same thing works as a link, so an NFC sticker on a shelf can start the record standing next to it.
Every screen
Tab bar navigation, full-screen Now Playing, time-synced lyrics that scroll in sync with the music, and an Up Next queue you can reorder by drag-and-drop. The controls you expect, where you expect them. Classical listeners get automatic work-and-movement grouping too, with a Navidrome 0.63+ server.
01 / Now Playing
The Now Playing view fills the screen with album art and transport controls at thumb level. Title, artist and album each get their own line, and a long one scrolls rather than being cut off. Swipe up for the Up Next queue. Swipe down to minimize. Everything reachable with one hand. Turn the phone on its side and the whole layout rearranges so every control fits on the one screen.
02 / Time-Synced Lyrics
The lyrics view scrolls automatically in sync with the music. The active line highlights in amber. Tap any line to jump to that position in the track. Works with .lrc files and server-side lyrics.
03 / Home & Library
Four tabs: Home, Search, Library and Settings. Library holds Artists, Composers, Albums, Recently Added, Recently Played, Recently Released, Songs, Favorites, Genres, Playlists, Radios, Directories and Downloads, and you can drag those rows into the order you want or hide the ones you never use. Connect Last.fm or ListenBrainz in Settings and Home adds a personalized stats shelf on top of the standard iOS music-app layout you already know, connected to your Navidrome server instead of a streaming service.
04 / Up Next Queue
Swipe up from Now Playing to see the Up Next queue. Drag tracks to reorder. The queue persists across app switches and lock-screen playback. AutoMix keeps music going when the queue runs out, seeded from your connected Last.fm or ListenBrainz account.
05 / Downloads
Browse everything you have downloaded by album, artist, or playlist. Behind the scenes, NaviBeat tracks live speed and queue stats while a download runs, keeps a history of every transfer, and lets you retry anything that failed with one tap, including sends from your Apple Watch.
06 / Offline Mode
Offline Mode is a switch at the top of Library now, not something buried in Settings, and NaviBeat flips it for you when your server stops answering, then flips it back when the server returns. The library keeps its real Artists, Albums, Songs and Playlists screens either way, with anything you have not downloaded greyed out instead of hidden. Favourites and ratings you set while cut off catch up afterwards. Turn on Prefer Downloaded Music and those same tracks keep playing from disk even after you are back online.
07 / Albums
The Albums grid packs more cover art on screen, and the A-to-Z rail on the right jumps straight to any letter. Your whole collection, browsable by cover, without a scroll marathon.
All screenshots
Now Playing
Time-synced lyrics
Home
Library
Up Next queue
Sleep timer
Downloads
Offline Mode
Albums
Launch price
One purchase. Every device.
iPhone, Mac, Apple TV, iPad, Apple Watch. Forever.
Questions
Open the App Store on your iPhone, search for NaviBeat, and install it. It runs on iOS 18 or later, on iPhone XS/XR and later (that includes iPhone 11 and newer).
NaviBeat is a client, so it connects to your own server. It works with Navidrome v0.50 or later, or any OpenSubsonic-compatible server, including Airsonic-Advanced and Gonic. It does not host or stream any music of its own.
NaviBeat is $5.99 USD, one time. It is a Universal Purchase, so that single price covers all five Apple platforms: iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch.
Yes. CarPlay is included with the iPhone app, so your library and Now Playing controls come along on your car's screen.
