Playback Controls & Seeking
This page covers the transport in detail: the buttons, the seek bar, repeat, and every place outside the app where you can control playback — the Lock Screen, Control Center, CarPlay, Bluetooth remotes, and the home screen widget.
For a tour of the whole Now Playing screen, see The Now Playing Screen.
The Transport Row
[SCREENSHOT: Transport row — Previous, Play/Pause, Next buttons]
Three buttons sit below the seek bar:
| Button | Tap | Long-press |
|---|---|---|
| ⏮ Previous | Step back one track in the queue | — |
| ▶ / ⏸ Play / Pause | Toggle playback | — |
| ⏭ Next | Step forward one track in the queue | Opens the Up Next queue after 400 ms |
The Play/Pause button is the primary control and is tinted purple while audio is playing, so you can tell the transport state at a glance even without reading the icon.
Previous does not restart the track. It moves to the previous entry in the queue. If you’re already on the first track, it does nothing — use the seek bar to return to the start of the current song.
Skipping Past the End of the Queue
Pressing ⏭ Next on the last track in the queue normally does nothing.
If you’ve turned on auto-generation in the Algorithm Tuner, Homecrate instead builds a fresh 30-track queue of recommendations (excluding what you just listened to), names it Recommended for You, and starts playing from its first track.
The Seek Bar
[SCREENSHOT: Seek bar with elapsed time, repeat button, and total duration below]
Drag the bar to jump anywhere in the track. While you’re dragging, the elapsed-time label follows your finger so you can land on a specific moment; the seek is committed when you release.
Below the bar:
- Left — elapsed time, as
m:ss - Centre — the repeat-one button (see below)
- Right — total track duration
Position updates once per second. While you’re dragging — and for half a second after you release — the ticking position is suppressed so it can’t snap the handle back out from under you.
Seeking keeps the spatial engines in sync. If Spectral 3D Sound or Spatial Audio is running, the seek is forwarded to that engine as well as to the main player, so the effect stays aligned with the song.
Repeat One
The small ↻ repeat icon between the two time labels toggles repeat-one for the current track. It turns blue when active.
There is only one repeat mode: repeat the current track. There is no repeat-queue mode — the queue itself is what defines what plays next. The button state is read from the player when the screen first loads and then stays in sync as you use it, so switching tabs won’t lose it.
Position Memory
Homecrate remembers where you were in two independent ways:
| What’s saved | How often | What it’s for |
|---|---|---|
| Position within the current track, keyed by track | Every 30 seconds, and only if you’ve moved more than 5 seconds since the last save | Reopening a specific track resumes near where you left it |
| The queue playhead (queue + index + position) | Every 10 seconds while playing | Relaunching the app restores the whole queue and your place in it |
The queue playhead expires after 24 hours. After that, the queue is still restored but playback starts at the beginning of the track.
Because saves are on a 30-second cycle, expect to land up to about half a minute earlier than where you actually stopped.
Lock Screen and Control Center
Playback continues in the background and on the Lock Screen. The controls exposed there are:
- Play
- Pause
- Next track
- Previous track
- Scrubbing (drag the Lock Screen progress bar to seek)
Artwork, title, artist, and duration are published to the system, so they also appear on connected watches, in Control Center, and on car displays. If album art finishes loading after the track has already started, Homecrate pushes the artwork again so the Lock Screen picture fills in rather than staying blank.
Time-Skip Buttons on Long Tracks
[SCREENSHOT: Lock Screen controls on a long track, showing skip-back and skip-forward buttons]
For long recordings, Homecrate adds jump forward and jump backward buttons to the Lock Screen and notification controls, in addition to next/previous.
The threshold is 10 minutes — a track longer than 600 seconds is treated as long-form. The buttons appear as soon as the player reports a duration over that threshold, and disappear again on the next shorter track. The jump interval itself is supplied by the system control that you press.
This exists so live sets, DJ mixes, and album-length single files can be navigated without dragging a scrubber that represents an hour of audio in a few centimetres.
CarPlay
CarPlay talks to Homecrate in two directions:
- Transport commands (play, pause, next, previous, scrub) are handled by the player directly, so they work even when the app has been in the background for a long time.
- Browse-and-play commands — picking an album, artist, or playlist, or hitting shuffle from the car’s screen — build a new queue in the app and start playback. Picking a specific song inside an album or playlist jumps straight to it rather than starting from track 1.
Repeated CarPlay commands within 2 seconds of each other are ignored, which prevents a double-tap on a car touchscreen from queuing the same album twice.
Bluetooth and Wired Remotes
Bluetooth headphones, car head units, and inline remotes use the same system transport commands as the Lock Screen, so play/pause, next, and previous all work without opening the app.
Next/previous from a remote advances Homecrate’s own queue — not the player’s internal playlist — so the Up Next order you built in the app is exactly the order you get from your headphones.
Widget Controls
The home screen widget can control playback directly:
| Widget action | Effect |
|---|---|
| Play / Pause | Toggles playback |
| Next / Previous | Moves through the queue |
| Stop | Pauses playback |
| Shuffle Library | Replaces the queue with your whole library, shuffled |
| Skip forward | Jumps ahead 30 seconds |
Widget presses reach the app through a cross-process notification, so they work whether or not the app is currently in the foreground.
Interruptions
When something else takes the audio session — a phone call, a timer, a voice assistant — Homecrate pauses instead of continuing silently. When the interruption ends, playback resumes automatically.
If the audio session was interrupted while you were already paused, Homecrate stays paused. This is deliberate: a resume that fires on a track you had deliberately stopped is worse than no resume at all.
Playback Errors
If a track fails to play — the file is missing, corrupt, or a stream is unreachable — Homecrate skips to the next track rather than sitting on a silent error. If there’s nothing to skip to, playback stops.
A common cause is a Plex track that isn’t downloaded while you’re off the network. See Downloading Tracks for Offline Use.
Tips
- The fastest route to the queue is a long-press on ⏭ Next — you don’t need to go back to the Library.
- If the Lock Screen shows the wrong track after a rapid series of skips, open the app once; the metadata is republished whenever the current track changes.
- Scrubbing on the Lock Screen and dragging the in-app seek bar are the same operation — either one will re-sync a running spatial effect.