Playback & Queue
The Now Playing screen, queue management, sleep timer, playback speed, and crossfade.
Now Playing
While a track is playing, a mini player sits above the tab bar. Tap it to open the full Now Playing screen, where you can:
- Play / pause, skip to the next or previous track, and seek within the track.
- Repeat — cycle Off → Repeat One → Repeat All.
- Shuffle the current queue.
- Start radio — build an endless queue of related songs.
You can also swipe the artwork left or right to jump to the next or previous track in the queue, right from Now Playing — the same gesture Spotify uses. It's disabled while Repeat One is active, since there's nothing to swipe to.
Picture-in-Picture
On Android, playing a video (a music video, lyric video, or podcast) can shrink into a small floating window that stays on top of other apps. Leave the app — press Home, switch apps — while video is actively playing, and it drops into Picture-in-Picture automatically; playback controls stay available right on the floating window.
Fullscreen player
From Now Playing you can go fullscreen, which gives the artwork and lyrics the whole screen and rotates into landscape.
- Double-tap the left or right half to seek backwards or forwards by 5 seconds; an overlay confirms the jump.
- Lyrics show here too, including the AI translation when you have it enabled.
- The lyrics provider can be switched without leaving the screen.
A subtitles toggle on the seek bar hides or shows that on-screen lyrics/captions overlay without leaving fullscreen. See the Settings reference for the YouTube subtitle translation language option.
Queue
From the Now Playing screen you can manage what plays next:
- Add to queue / Play next.
- Reorder tracks (move up / down).
- Remove a track from the queue.
- Endless queue — when enabled, SimpMusic keeps adding related songs so playback never stops.
Radio
Start radio builds a queue of related music around whatever you picked, so you get an ongoing mix instead of a fixed list. You can start one from several places:
| Start it from | You get |
|---|---|
| A song's ⋯ menu | A mix built around that track |
| An artist page | A station named "<artist>" Radio |
| A playlist | A mix seeded from that playlist |
Radio needs an endpoint that YouTube Music supplies with the item. Occasionally an item has none — SimpMusic then says "Radio Endpoint is not available" rather than starting an empty queue. Trying a different song or the artist page usually works.
Sleep timer
Stop playback automatically after a set time or when the current song ends.
Open the Now Playing screen and tap the sleep timer.
Pick a preset — 5, 10, 15, 30, 45 minutes or 1 hour — or choose End of song to stop once the current track finishes, or type any custom number of minutes.
To cancel, open the timer again and remove it.
Playback speed & pitch
Adjust playback speed (and pitch on Android) from the Now Playing sheet.
Playback speed & pitch is disabled while Crossfade is enabled. On the desktop app, only speed is available.
Crossfade
Crossfade smoothly fades the current track out while the next fades in. It's off by default; turn it on and tune it under Settings → Crossfade:
- Crossfade duration — Auto, or 1–30 seconds (default 5 s).
- DJ-Style Transition (Android) — applies filter sweeps similar to Apple Music's Automix. This one is on by default once crossfade is enabled.
You can see it happening on the Now Playing screen: while two tracks are blending, the seek bar stops being white and cycles through rainbow colours, then settles back once the transition finishes.
What "Auto" actually does
Auto is closer to a DJ beatmatch than a plain fade. When SimpMusic has tempo and key data for both tracks, it:
- Matches tempo — nudges the incoming track's speed toward the outgoing one, and understands half/double-time pairs, so a 70 BPM track blends into a 140 BPM one instead of fighting it.
- Matches key — compares the two tracks on the Camelot wheel and pitch-shifts slightly to bring them into harmony.
- Sizes the blend to the gap — tracks in compatible keys get a short crossfade; the further apart the keys and tempos, the longer the blend it gives them.
Tempo and key come from audio analysis attached to the stream, so tracks without that data simply fall back to a plain timed crossfade. Nothing to configure — pick Auto and it applies whenever the data is there.
Full settings reference
Audio, playback, crossfade and more.
