Release 2026.4.1rc1 — webradios are here 📻

[b0bbywan]

Fresh release out of the oven: 2026.4.1rc1 🥳

What's new

• 📻 Web radios — not first-class yet, but already a huge improvement: support via upmpdcli plugins (radio-browser, radio-paradise, mother-earth-radio, upmpdcli-radios). Guide: https://docs.odio.love/guides/webradios/
• 🔔 MOTD update notice — your odio box now tells you which components have updates available on login
• 📦 Release manifest — each release ships a manifest.json listing component versions, used by the update-check mechanism

Full changelog in the release notes.

A first contributor 🎉

This release also marks a major milestone: odio's first external contribution. Huge thanks to @pbattino for stepping in this early and doing the exploratory work on web radios — it made it possible to ship a first iteration quickly, and honestly it's the best webradio UX I've had since I started this project. I really hope this'll make you feel comfortable contributing again. 🙏

Where to jump in — mostly UX right now

A few threads are open where input (or a PR!) would really move things forward. They're all on the UX side — no deep infra knowledge required, just opinions and taste:

• 🔊 Sonic identity for odio — sound design / UX folks especially welcome. Exploratory, no timeline.
• 📡 Network scanner for odio-launcher — since mDNS isn't available in the browser, how do we help users find their odio box?
• 🔔 Notification system — a notification layer for odio-pwa, with an mpris "now playing" card as a first use case.

myMPD — help wanted too

Quick update on myMPD: turns out I was mistaken about the packaging situation and I'll have to build arm packages + publish them on my apt repo again. I've started working on it but can't promise a timeline.

In the meantime, I came across myMPD's customization options which look great for making it feel more integrated into odio (even though it runs on a separate port). I'd like to make that customization a prerequisite before shipping myMPD support — if anyone wants to dig in, this would be a great first thing to tackle!

Long-term solution discussions stay open. 💬

[b0bbywan]

On another note, I feel like mympd + the complete upgrade process would be really nice ux wise to leave the beta process, let me know what you think about it.

[pbattino]

I tried 2026.4.1rc1 , tried to use webradios from a couple of Android UPnP apps and they do show up. So far, the only app (at least AFAIK) that allows to browse AND search a radio station by name is Bubble DS . This is important in particular for the radio-browser "tuner" (can I call it that way?), as there are thousands of radios, simply browsing by category is not really feasible. For the other tuners there is much less stuff, in theory you can live with just browsing.

The UX is terrible in any app, in my opinion, not sure why there is no decent UPnP controller app for Android.... They all seem half-backed or simply broken or highly counter-intuitive. I tried Bubble, YAACC, AirPinCast.
But hey, this at least proves that odio is exposing the radio station in the right way.

Unrelated but nice: Shairport now works for me out of the box, in previous version it was disable and it could not be enabled.

[b0bbywan]

Thanks for the honest feedback, I really appreciate it ! Btw how did you update ? curl | bash or reflash ? Do you know what version you had before ? I'm curious 😇

With this release, there will be this file with precious debug infos in it :) I'm about to publish an RC2 to improve a bit the some parts for the future upgrade process, but that can be ignored without causing issues. Meaning you can skip that update (or any update) and wait for one that has a real interest for you. Here we go, another doc page to add 🤣

odio@raspodio3bwifi:~ $ cat ~/.cache/odio/state.json 
{
    "install_mode": "live",
    "odios": "2026.4.1rc1",
    "roles": {
        "bluetooth": "2026.4.0rc5",
        "branding": "2026.4.1rc1",
        "common": "2026.4.0rc6",
        "mpd": "2026.4.0rc7",
        "mpd_discplayer": "2026.4.0rc7",
        "odio_api": "2026.4.0rc7",
        "pulseaudio": "2026.4.0rc7",
        "shairport_sync": "2026.4.1rc1",
        "snapclient": "2026.4.0rc5",
        "spotifyd": "2026.4.0rc7",
        "upmpdcli": "2026.4.1rc1"
    }
}

To be honest again, my previous UX with webradios was worse even, so even if UpNP app suck (I really agree on you with this), I feel this is still a good first start. Mympd will be the second one.

I do use radio-browser more than I did before, so I consider this a win, but maybe that's first days excitement from a new feature and I won't use it anymore in a few weeks, we'll see.

From what I understand, UpNp/DLNA standard is pretty flacky, that's why there's so much issues with it, and Android Apps are also a victim of that. I think OpenHome is a bit better, and fix some of the usual UpNp/DLNA standard lacks.

Wild idea, maybe if we got an Android Dev contributor on board, she or he could trying making a basic OpenHome remote that fit odio needs better ? I don't have those skills, not even with Claude, nor the will to try that at the moment 🤓

Unrelated but nice: Shairport now works for me out of the box, in previous version it was disable and it could not be enabled.

Oh I wish I knew earlier 😅 I've made various shairport improvements over the latest releases so I can't be sure which really fixed it.
Probably 2026.4.0rc7 odio didn't work in wifi at all before, I hadn't tested yet 🙄.

Shairport Idempotent in the present release is more a rigor question than a real fix, I don't think it was causing issues, but now I'm sure it won't!

[b0bbywan]

Here we go upgrade doc and 2026.4.1rc2