Music Assistant’s smart crossfades could be barely audible on Spotify—and disappear entirely on short tracks—because each song had to build its playback cushion from zero. On a tested Sonos group, Spotify provided 8.4 seconds for a fade where the same speakers provided 44.5 seconds from a local file.
The fix carries that cushion into the next song. In the submitted hardware test, the available fade window grew from 8.4 to 36.7 to 44.5 seconds across three tracks instead of resetting at every boundary.
This builds on earlier work that moved Spotify and other real-time-source crossfades into Music Assistant itself. The new fix is marked for a stable backport.