PlaybackThatFollowsYou:Mini-Player,CrateRadio,andOpeninYT

The mini-player follows you across the app

Press DIG, a track starts, you click through to community to check on a post, you come back — before, playback stopped and the page reset. That is fixed. The YouTube player now lives at the root of the app, not inside the dig page. Audio continues across every route change. On the dig page it sits exactly where it always did, framed by the track card. On any other page it drops to a small strip in the bottom-right corner so you can keep listening while you read a thread or browse your saved crates.

When you return to the dig page mid-playback, the app picks up the track you were listening to — from your history if it is there, from the YouTube ID directly if not — and seamlessly restores the full dig view. No blank state, no interruption.

Crate Radio: a 10-track drifting session from any seed

Hit RADIO on any track and CrateDrop builds a drifting session around it — ten tracks that move outward from your seed in genre, style, and era. First track plays immediately. The next nine queue up and auto-advance as each one finishes. It works on any track you can play, including tracks that only came from a YouTube match with no Discogs data behind them — a common gap in earlier versions where radio refused to seed.

The session is not a repeat of tracks you already played. Radio pulls fresh recommendations at incremental drift levels so each stop moves a little further from the seed than the last. The result feels less like a shuffle and more like slowly rotating through a crate, from one region of sound to the next.

Open in YT: the Premium workaround, clearly labelled

Quick, honest answer to a question we get a lot: the embedded YouTube player cannot play audio when the app is backgrounded on mobile. This is not a flag we forgot to set. YouTube explicitly detects when the iframe is not visible and pauses playback. Premium does not change this because Premium only applies when you are signed into YouTube directly, not inside a third-party embed.

Every track now has an Open in YT button in the overflow menu. Tap it on mobile and the track opens in the installed YouTube app — where you are signed in, where Premium is active, where background audio and lockscreen controls just work. Tap it on desktop and it opens a new tab. It is not seamless, but it is the only legitimate way to get Premium perks on a web app without scraping audio streams in a way that would get CrateDrop banned.

What changed under the hood

• —Player lifted to the root layout — one iframe, anchor-positioned to the dig page via ResizeObserver
• —Crate Radio seed builder has a direct YouTube fallback for tracks with no Discogs metadata
• —Return-to-dig rehydrates from history or a minimal track shape — no empty state flash
• —Open in YT uses the youtu.be short URL so both Android and iOS deep-link to the native app
• —SoundCloud playback path removed — YouTube is now the only playback source, simpler and more reliable