1-bit 1.9, The Long Day Is Over
1-bit 1.9 is on the App Store. A binaural renderer that puts the stereo image out around your head, a live spectrum and true-peak analyzer fed by a tap that only reads, favorites that back up to your own bridge, composers and genres as first-class sections, and a measured answer to whether a hi-res file really is one.
Updated
1-bit 1.9 is on the App Store. Same URL, new build, free update.
It is the biggest release the app has had. 290 commits, 532 files, which is more than 1.8, and unlike 1.8 a good half of it is new machinery rather than fixes. Two of the four headline features are switches you have to go and turn on yourself, which is roughly how I want this app to behave.
What’s new
Is this file actually what it says it is
This one started as a question I could not answer about my own library. I have files that were sold as hi-res. Some of them almost certainly are not.
On a v0.1.9 bridge, Signal Path now shows a measured true peak, a dynamic range score, and an estimated key and tempo for each track. Alongside those, two checks that are less flattering and more useful. FLAC files carry a checksum of the audio written by the encoder, so the app compares it against what actually decodes; a mismatch means the file has been altered since it was made. It is a flag rather than a verdict, since plenty of tag editors rewrite a FLAC without updating that checksum. And the bandwidth reading answers the hi-res question directly: if a 96 kHz file has nothing above 21 kHz in it, you are looking at an upsample wearing a nice sample rate.
DSD deliberately gets no verdict at all. Its noise shaping puts so much energy above the audible band that the same measurement cannot separate a genuine 1-bit master from a converted one. I would rather the app say nothing there than say something confident and wrong. The analyzer works the same way: a reading that is physically impossible gets thrown away rather than displayed, because a meter that occasionally lies is worse than no meter.
Two switches, both off
Spatial audio and the live meters both live in Settings, Audio, and both ship off. Spatial is a processing stage, so it belongs to the same family as crossfeed and ReplayGain: if you want the file untouched, leave it alone. The meters are off for a different reason. Off means the measurement tap does not exist, rather than existing and being ignored, and I would rather that be the shipped state than a promise in a footnote.
Head tracking asks for Motion & Fitness the first time you use it. Decline and the spatial effect still works, it just stays fixed in place instead of following your head. That motion data is read on the audio path and never stored, never uploaded, and never leaves the phone. One more honest note: spatial plays about 6 dB quieter than bypass. That headroom is what stops the renderer clipping on loud material, and Dirac and Sonarworks do the same thing for the same reason. Do not A/B it by ear alone and conclude the bypass sounds better; it sounds louder.
The parts nobody asks for but everybody notices
Waveforms no longer need a bridge. In 1.8 the drifting dust field behind the progress bar only appeared for tracks your bridge had analysed. Now the phone will do it itself when the source has none, DSD included, so SMB shares, UPnP servers and folders on the device get real waveforms too.
The first sync got a lot lighter. My own library pulled 1.78 GB the first time it ran, and 1.3 GB of that was cover art the bridge was handing over at full size for the phone to immediately throw most of the pixels away. The bridge now right-sizes covers once, on the server, and the app stops re-fetching what it already has. Sync also reports honest progress instead of claiming to be done and then carrying on.
Renaming or moving a file on your server used to make the track vanish until a full rescan, taking its playlist slot and its download with it. The scanner now recognises it as the same track in its new home and carries all of that across. Offline, playback moves on to the next downloaded track instead of stopping dead at the first one you do not have. And a playlist can no longer claim to be fully available offline when it is not, which it could, and did.
If you have no server at all, Sources, +, Add Demo Bridge pairs a small read-only public library in one tap so you can try the whole thing before setting anything up.
And on the bridge side
Bridge 0.1.9 does the measuring behind the analysis above, and got a fairly serious pass of its own.
Metadata matching used to compare titles byte for byte, so a curly apostrophe against a straight one, or ”&” against “and”, threw away a match the server had already returned. That is fixed, and a lot of albums that sat there unmatched for months resolved on the next scan. It also serves one copy of each duplicated track instead of three, adds acoustic fingerprinting for files whose tags are useless, and stores favorites for the app.
As always, none of it is required. 1.9 runs fine against an older bridge, the wire protocol is still v1, and no re-pairing is needed for any of this. The analysis columns simply do not appear.
Same audio path
No transcoding. No resampling. No mixer in the path. DSD still goes out as DoP to your USB DAC and PCM still goes out at the file’s own sample rate. Spatial audio is a stage you choose, it never touches DSD, and the app says so in Signal Path when you have it on. The analyzer reads and does not write. The measurements come from a pass the bridge ran hours earlier on another machine. With everything left at its defaults, the bytes that reach your DAC are the bytes in your files. How DSD playback is handled →
The down-to-earth version
If you already have 1-bit: open the App Store and tap update. Your shares, bridges, folders, playlists and settings carry over, and there is nothing to re-pair. Favorites, Composers and Genres appear in the library on their own. Spatial audio and the meters wait for you in Settings, Audio. If you run a bridge, update it too and the analysis columns fill in after the next scan.
If you are new: it is a free download, iPhone or iPad, iOS 26.1 or later. Bring a NAS, a bridge, a UPnP server, or just a folder of files on the phone. A USB DAC if you want DSD. Or tap the demo library and borrow mine for an evening.
A lot of this release came out of messages from people using it. The favorites, the composer handling and half the sync work were all somebody else’s idea first. Thank you, and keep them coming.