Continuity
Start playing on one device, carry on with another.
Continuity moves what is playing between your phones and computers, mid-track, and lets any of them control the one making the sound. Think Spotify Connect, for your own Jellyfin, Emby or Navidrome library.
What it is
Normally every device you listen on keeps its own queue. Put an album on at your desk, walk out the door, and the phone in your pocket knows nothing about it - you find the album again, find the track, and scrub to where you were.
With Continuity, your devices share one playback session instead. Exactly one of them is playing at a time; the others know what it is playing, how far in it is, and what comes next. Moving the music is a matter of picking another device.
What you can do with it
- Hand off: pick another device from the device menu and playback moves there - same queue, same order, same spot in the track. The device you left pauses itself.
- Pull it over: on the device in your hand, choose This device and the music comes to it.
- Remote control: while another device plays, the player bar on every other one follows it and its buttons drive it - play, pause, skip, previous, shuffle, repeat, volume, and jumping to any track in its queue.
- See where it is playing: a strip under the player names the device that has the music, so you never wonder which one is making the sound.
- Speakers too: if the device you move to was casting to a DLNA speaker or AirPlay, the handoff lands on the device itself and leaves the speaker free.
Setting it up
Continuity runs through a Jellybox Link account. Sign in to it from the Jellybox Link section in Settings on each device you want to include, and they appear in each other's device menu.
Every device has to be signed in to the same Jellyfin, Emby or Navidrome server, because each one plays the music from that server itself. A device signed in to a different server is told the queue belongs to a server it cannot reach, rather than playing the wrong thing.
Your music stays yours
Jellybox Link never sees or stores your audio, and it has no idea what your library contains. What passes through it is the queue as a list of item IDs, the position in the track, and which device is playing. Each device turns those IDs back into songs against your own server. Nothing is shared with third parties.
Worth knowing
Continuity is experimental. It works day to day, but expect the occasional delay or rough edge, and please report them.
An Android phone that is asleep - screen off, app not running - still shows up in the device menu as Asleep, and picking it wakes it up and starts playback there.
An iPhone can take over playback only while JellyBox is running on it. iOS does not let an app in the background start playing on its own, which is also why Spotify cannot wake an iPhone. You can still control an iPhone that is already playing, even when it is locked.
Computers are not woken either: a laptop has to be awake with JellyBox open to join in.
Anything missing?
Get JellyBox
JellyBox is free and open source under AGPL-3.0, and works with Jellyfin, Emby and Navidrome servers. Grab it from the download page, or read the source.