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@github-actions github-actions released this 08 Jun 13:39
· 13 commits to main since this release
v0.9.4
eb7dbf1

Parachord v0.9.4

Release date: 2026-06-05

A Linux release. Three Linux blockers from the last few months land together — Apple Music sign-in finally works, playerctl and KDE/GNOME media widgets see Parachord with full now-playing metadata via MPRIS, and the AppImage MCP config path is now stable across restarts. Plus a batch of sync fixes that benefit every platform: tracks you remove from Collection actually stay removed, Daily Brew auto-updates instead of nagging you, and ListenBrainz scrobbles now carry source URLs + MBIDs so the rest of the LB ecosystem knows where you streamed from.

Linux: Apple Music, media keys, and a stable MCP path

Three independent issues that all blocked Linux users land in this release:

  • Apple Music sign-in works on Linux and Windows. The MusicKit JS auth popup never worked on these platforms because Electron's session-level "block third-party cookies" gate prevented the popup → parent handshake. Parachord now opens a dedicated browser window against beta.music.apple.com directly, harvests the auth cookies on success, and reinjects the user token into the main window's MusicKit JS instance. Library sync runs end-to-end. Verified across five test rounds with two Linux testers (Fedora + Arch). Thanks @dyland84 and @moop250.
  • Linux media keys + DE widgets via MPRIS. Parachord now registers on org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.parachord, so playerctl, KDE Plasma media widget, GNOME media widget, and any other MPRIS client sees now-playing track metadata (title, artist, album, art) and routes play / pause / skip / previous controls. The existing globalShortcut media-key path still works; MPRIS adds a second dispatch path that DEs typically prefer. (v1 limitation: the progress slider in DE widgets is read-only — interactive seeking via MPRIS is a follow-up.)
  • AppImage MCP config path is now stable. AppImage mounts itself at /tmp/.mount_<RANDOM>/ on every launch, so the MCP stdioPath Parachord exposed via Settings was going stale on every restart. The bridge is now extracted to ~/.config/Parachord/mcp-stdio.js once per launch — copy that path into your MCP client config once and it stays valid across restarts and upgrades. Thanks @theli-ua for the precise repro.

Removed tracks stay removed

Tracks you delete from your Collection no longer silently reappear on the next sync. Two intersecting bugs caused this:

  • The Spotify removeTracks provider was hitting a non-existent /me/library endpoint instead of /me/tracks — a regression in an earlier "unified library API" attempt. Local removal succeeded but the remote DELETE silently failed, so the next sync re-imported the still-present track from Spotify.
  • Apple Music has no public-API removal endpoint at all (their library DELETE returns 401), so AM-sourced track removals were guaranteed to revert on the next sync no matter what we did.

Fixed both. The Spotify endpoint now hits DELETE /me/tracks with the correct body. For Apple Music — and as defense-in-depth for any future Spotify failure — a new track-level tombstone mechanism persists every "user removed this on purpose" intent keyed by (provider, externalId). The sync diff filters remote items against this list before adding, so user intent stays sovereign regardless of whether the remote-remove API works.

Tombstones expire after 365 days of no sync confirming the remote still has the track, and clear automatically when you re-add the same track via the UI.

Daily Brew (and friends) update silently

Spotify's algorithmic playlists — Daily Brew, Discover Weekly, Release Radar, Daily Mix N, Daylist, New Music Friday — used to flag the "pull updates" banner every morning when their content rotated. Pure UX nag for content you can't meaningfully reject or edit.

Sync now detects Spotify-curated playlists (those owned by Spotify itself rather than your account) and silently auto-adopts their daily updates. No banner, content refetches in the background, tomorrow's Daily Brew shows up tomorrow. The banner still appears for your own playlists where local-edit conflicts are real and worth your confirmation.

Phantom macOS Apple Music re-auth dialog gone

The native macOS "Sign in to your Apple Account" dialog used to pop up unexpectedly during routine sync runs, asking for re-authentication that wasn't actually needed. Root cause: the native MusicKit helper was passing .ignoreCache to every user-token fetch, forcing a server round-trip that Apple sometimes responded to with a sign-in prompt.

Fixed: only the explicit recovery path (after Apple returns 401 on a real request) busts the cache. Routine fetches use MusicKit's local token cache and stay quiet.

ListenBrainz scrobbles carry source URLs and MBIDs

Every Parachord-emitted ListenBrainz scrobble now includes:

  • origin_url — the URL of the source you actually streamed from
  • music_service and music_service_name — canonical hostname + label
  • spotify_id — when you have a verified Spotify source on the track
  • recording_mbid, release_mbid, and artist_mbids — when known

Two benefits:

  1. LB profile UX. Scrobble rows can render "Listen on Spotify / Apple Music / etc." links from the source URL the user actually heard.
  2. Achordion match cache. The shared community track-links cache can key by MBID for any Parachord-played LB-scrobbled track, even when the achordion submit plugin's confidence gate excluded it.

MCP seek tells you where it actually went

The MCP seek tool used to report the requested offset as confirmedMs even if the audio engine clamped to a different position (end-of-track, DRM boundaries, edge cases on some Apple Music tracks). The Apple Music paths now query the engine for the actual position after the seek and report that. Thanks @gjtorikian for the careful PR review that surfaced this.

Smaller things

  • canShortCircuitPlaylistUpdate log line. Short-circuited playlist updates are now distinguishable from "never reached" in sync traces — useful when debugging "why didn't sync update playlist X."
  • Three-if Apple Music seek branch documented as intentional. The seek path tries native → MusicKit JS → preview audio as independent branches (not else-if) so each branch can silently recover when a more-preferred engine is unreachable. Now there's a comment explaining why.
  • Mobile-parity rule documented in CLAUDE.md. The implicit pattern of filing parachord-mobile parity tickets alongside desktop changes is now a documented process rule. Catches cross-platform drift before it hits sync corruption.
Full auto-generated changelog (PR list)

What's Changed

Resolvers & Playback

Sync & Scrobbling

Other Changes

  • docs: correct v0.9.3 notes on AM share URL fix by @jherskowitz in #845
  • sync: preserve durable link on dedup-layer fetch error (#846) by @jherskowitz in #847
  • docs: CLAUDE.md voice note for external-contributor responses by @jherskowitz in #849
  • desktop: set window.__parachordClient = 'desktop' for plugin telemetry (#851) by @jherskowitz in #852
  • Update parachord-android references → parachord-mobile by @jherskowitz in #853
  • love-push: MB recording-search fallback + retry queue for transient failures by @jherskowitz in #854
  • announcements: filter by surfaces field by @jherskowitz in #855
  • feat(mcp): add seek and get_position tools, take two by @gjtorikian in #857
  • mcp seek: read back actual position from AM engines + document three-if pattern (#858) by @jherskowitz in #860
  • scrobbler: enrich LB additional_info with source URL + MBIDs by @jherskowitz in #861
  • fix(mcp): extract stdio bridge to stable user-data path (#866) by @jherskowitz in #867
  • docs: CLAUDE.md rule — proactively file mobile parity tickets by @jherskowitz in #870
  • sync: silently auto-update Spotify-curated playlists (Daily Brew, etc.) by @jherskowitz in #871
  • feat(linux): MPRIS D-Bus integration for media keys + DE widgets (#848) by @jherskowitz in #872

Full Changelog: v0.9.3...v0.9.4

Contributors

gjtorikian, jherskowitz, and 3 other contributors
Assets 20
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