Arsound

English · Русский

A mod for the Android SoundCloud app with track downloads, your own music from your phone, and playlists that open instantly — even without internet.

Ready-to-install APKs of every version are posted in the Telegram channel t.me/arsound_git. This GitHub repository holds the source code and the patch set for ReVanced Manager.

Arsound is a set of patches based on ReVanced. It is an unofficial project, not affiliated with ReVanced or SoundCloud.

Tested on SoundCloud 2026.10.14-release, Android 16, arm64. With another SoundCloud version some features may not work.

Features

Everything is configured inside SoundCloud: Settings → Arsound. The sections are grouped (Main, Music, Data, App), each with an icon and a line about its state; inside a section the settings sit in cards under coloured headings, the icon of a switch lights up while it is on, a long description hides behind a "?", and the options of an enabled feature are indented under it. (Menu and button names below are given as they appear in the English interface; the app itself can be switched between Russian and English in Settings → Arsound → Appearance.)

The magnifier at the right of the "Arsound" title searches all settings: the field grows out of the button, results appear as you type (by a setting's name, its section or a word from its description), and a tap opens the right screen, scrolls to the setting and lights it up. The search understands your own words too: "storage", "memory" and "space" find the same things, "background" finds the wallpaper, "internet" and "VPN" find the network, "crossfade", "fade" and "smooth transition" find the transition, "comments" (also misspelt) finds the comments switch, "hello" and "greeting" find the home screen greeting; word endings, typing mistakes and a wrong keyboard layout ("gfvznm") are forgiven, and a line under the result says which word it was found by. The search follows the theme's colours.

No clutter

• No ads: no audio ads between tracks, no banners in the player, library and feed. Since 24.10.2026 SoundCloud also puts an ad at the start of a new play queue; Arsound does not let it into the queue either (before, it stopped playback on a full screen ad page whose sound never loaded).
• No pushy Go, Go+ and Pro subscription offers: no purchase screen, no banners on the home screen and in the library, no "Get Pro" and "Upgrade" buttons in the header. The Upgrade tab, which in the original always ended in "Oops" (a subscription is sold only through Google Play, and Arsound is not installed from there), explains this instead and has a "Hide the tab" button (the main screen is built again, the music and downloads go on); it can also be hidden in Settings → Arsound → Ads and subscription.
• No "Transfer your gems" banner in the library: it has its own close button, but comes back by itself after a few days.
• No "Share screenshot" sheet after every screenshot (Android 14+). It can be turned back on in Settings → Arsound → Ads and subscription; then it opens once per screenshot, not twice as in the original on the player screen.
• Telemetry is turned off.
• Duplicates in recommendations (re-uploads of the same track) can be hidden: on the home screen, in autoplay and in the mixes SoundCloud builds for you (Your Mix, Daily Drops, Weekly Wave). Optionally, versions at a different speed ("0.9 speed", "1.2x", slowed) and remixes count as the same track. Autoplay never adds a track that is already in the play queue (played, playing or waiting), with the filter on or off. Fixed: when autoplay added tracks, the player, the mini player and the notification could show a track that was not playing, and the next swipe or the end of the track jumped to a wrong one.
• "For you" playlist: once a day Arsound takes your likes, playlists, imported and most-played tracks, asks Last.fm what people listen to alongside them and which artists are similar (when Last.fm does not know the songs themselves, as often with small Russian artists, more similar artists are taken), and puts up to 40 tracks that are new to you from SoundCloud into a playlist — at most two per artist, without tracks you already know or marked "Not interested", and without re-uploads of the same song or of a song marked "Not interested" (same title, length within two seconds; a remix or another speed is another song here). The playlist refreshes every day at 00:00 without opening the app; if there is no network at that moment or the IP is Russian, the refresh runs at the first opportunity. You can also refresh it by hand: Settings → Arsound → Recommendations. Only track and artist names are sent to Last.fm. Last.fm and SoundCloud do not work from a Russian IP, so the refresh needs a VPN there.
• "Not for me: don't recommend" in a track's "⋮" menu: the track disappears from the home screen, autoplay and SoundCloud's mixes. The list is stored on the phone, and the track can be restored in Settings → Arsound → Recommendations (a long list is shown 50 at a time, then "Show more"). Likes, playlists and search are unchanged.

Downloads

• "Download file" in a track's menu — saves to the Music/Arsound folder, if the whole track is available to you. The file is named "Artist - Title" (the artist the track names, else the account that uploaded it); the title and artist are also written to the media store, so music players list the track by them (best effort: if the system refuses, the file keeps its name only). "Download file again" keeps the old file until the new one is complete, so a download that fails on a bad network does not cost the track its file; a download that failed is no longer counted as downloaded.
• "Check track downloads" in a playlist's menu: how many tracks are already downloaded and how many more can be. The check requests the file link right away, so tracks blocked in your region land in "unavailable", not "can be downloaded". Already downloaded tracks are not downloaded again. Several tracks are checked at once; a track found unavailable is remembered for 12 hours, so re-checking the same playlist is instant. A track the server gave no answer about (rate limit, network or server error) is listed as "could not be checked" and is not remembered: check again later.
• More than 500 tracks in a playlist: SoundCloud keeps 500 at most, so the tracks added past that stay on the phone only (they play and show in the playlist, but not on other devices). The first time, Arsound explains this in a dialog in the theme's colours, with a "Do not show again" box.
• SoundCloud's own download buttons download with Arsound: "Download" in the menu of a track, a playlist and an album, the button on the track page. In the original they need Go or Go+ and otherwise open the subscription offer (hidden in Arsound, so a tap did nothing). The track menu item loses its "Go" badge; a track downloaded already is not downloaded again by it ("Download file again" does that). With a subscription SoundCloud downloads by itself, so its own download keeps working. Settings → Arsound → Ads and subscription → "SoundCloud download buttons use Arsound" (on by default) gives the buttons back to SoundCloud entirely.
• The round download button at the top left of a playlist, an album and "Your likes" does the same check with Arsound (in the original it downloads only with Go+ and otherwise opens the subscription offer). For the likes it checks every liked track. With a subscription that includes downloads the button stays SoundCloud's own. Playlists made by SoundCloud itself ("Related tracks", mixes) have no such button: there is no playlist to check, and in the original it only opened the subscription offer.
• While a playlist is being checked or downloaded, a small badge with a count hangs at the bottom of the screen — "14 of 48". It sits above the mini-player, or above the bottom tabs when there is no player, and slides smoothly when the player appears or goes away. It is hidden while the player is expanded to full screen.
• Downloaded tracks play straight from the file — without internet, without traffic and without waiting for SoundCloud, even if there is a connection that does not respond. The "next" button on headphones and in the notification also switches to a downloaded track instantly.
• The library opens offline: playlists (including ones made only of tracks on the phone), albums, likes and followings are shown from the phone's memory right away, the server's answer follows. Covers of library playlists and albums are stored on the phone as files (updated if the cover changes on the server), so even offline the library, "Recently played" and the playlist header have pictures. Track covers that come over the network are kept too (up to 150 MB, the oldest go first), so offline the track rows show them, or another size of the same cover if only that one is kept. Tracks added to a playlist on the phone (as in "For you" or merged playlists) are no longer wiped by SoundCloud's scheduled database cleanup: offline such a playlist shows all its tracks, not only the ones stored for some other reason. Tracks the cleanup has already wiped come back once the playlist is opened online.
• The Downloads section shows tracks and playlists downloaded by Arsound — without a SoundCloud subscription. A playlist counts as downloaded when a download was started from its check, or the check found everything available already on the phone. "Delete downloaded tracks" removes the mark, and an open Downloads screen refreshes immediately.
• "Storage" (Settings → Arsound → Storage and downloads): how many tracks are downloaded and how much space they take, deleting all downloads with one button after a confirmation, the size of the stream cache. Files downloaded before a reinstall are removed by Android only after its own confirmation, which the app shows.
• There too: deleting the files of unplayed tracks (off by default). If a downloaded track was not played for longer than the chosen period (7, 30, 90 days, a year or any number from 1 to 365), its file is deleted when the app starts. The period counts from the last play, or from the download for tracks never played. The track stays in SoundCloud: it can be streamed and downloaded again. Tracks imported from the phone are deleted by the same period only with "Delete imported tracks too" on (off by default). The copy of a downloaded track that SoundCloud deleted is never deleted: nothing could bring it back.
• In library cards, after the track count there is a download icon and the number of tracks that play from the phone: downloaded by Arsound and imported. In the playlist header the same number follows an arrow: "38 tracks · ↓ 28". The track count in cards also includes tracks added only on this phone (a playlist made of such tracks used to show "0 Tracks"). The lists of all library playlists are read from the phone's memory after launch, you don't need to open each one.
• If Arsound was reinstalled, the app asks for access to music: without it Android does not let it read tracks downloaded before the reinstall.
• Everything SoundCloud serves without protection can be downloaded: if the app is refused a stream, the same track is requested the way the web player does it, and all stream variants are tried in turn.
• Subscriber-only tracks and previews are not downloaded. Tracks that only have DRM-protected streams (FairPlay, Widevine) can be played but not saved to a file — the menu and the playlist check say so: "protected by DRM". "Download" hands such a track to SoundCloud's offline library; without Go+ SoundCloud usually refuses the licence, and when its downloader has not taken the track within 2 minutes on Wi-Fi, Arsound takes the request back and says why. While the track waits, its menu has "Cancel the download" in place of "Download file".
• Tracks served only as a protected HLS stream are assembled by the app itself: segments are downloaded, decrypted and packed into a single .m4a file — a regular MP4 with the whole length in its header (before 0.9.3 the file kept the index of its first segment, so some players showed ten seconds and stopped; such tracks need to be downloaded again; if the old file is left from an earlier install and cannot be replaced, the new one is saved next to it as name (1).m4a, and the track plays the new one). It takes a few seconds after the download, and the track shows a spinner the whole time; a whole playlist is assembled two tracks at a time, so a long one does not run the app out of memory; a segment that fails on a bad network is requested again (up to three times), and while there is no network the queue waits for it instead of losing tracks; in the playlist check such tracks are marked "background processing".
• While a track is downloading, its download icon spins; for a playlist — while the tracks started from its check are downloading. The icon spins at the tap, before the file is found and queued, and turns into the downloaded one as soon as the file is ready — in every list, including the search, the likes and profiles, without leaving the screen. A protected track that goes to SoundCloud's own offline library is followed the same way.
• Arsound search — for tracks that can't be downloaded from SoundCloud (not in the catalog, subscriber-only, preview, DRM). On the Search tab, under the search bar, there is a "SoundCloud / Arsound" switch; a small "?" on the Arsound half explains what it is. Arsound searches YouTube Music; the results look like SoundCloud's search — with covers, artist avatars, album and artist pages with a big picture. Tap a track to listen and check it is the right one; the button on the right downloads it into the "Imported" playlist, from where it can be added to any playlist. Besides tracks, artists and albums are found: an artist opens as a list of their albums, an album as a list of tracks with a "Download all" button. The album cover is saved with the track: one copy per album, shared by all its tracks. YouTube serves age-restricted tracks only after sign-in: optionally sign in to YouTube Music in Settings → Arsound → Account (the password is entered on Google's page, the session is stored only on the phone); if you try to download such a track without signing in, the app offers to do it. When YouTube takes your network for a bot ("Sign in to confirm that you're not a bot", common with VPNs), the track is asked for once more the way the YouTube Music website does it, with Google's BotGuard tokens; if that is refused too, the app offers to sign in (with an account it suggests another network or VPN server). How it works — docs/downloading-tracks.md (in Russian).
• A Go+ track (an account without the subscription gets only a 30-second preview) and a track blocked in your region now explain themselves when you try to download them: a window says plainly that such a track cannot be downloaded in Arsound, in another mod or in any other way, and that there is no need to ask. The playlist check adds the same note under its list of unavailable tracks.
• "Delete the downloaded file" in a track's menu and "Delete downloaded tracks" in a playlist's menu (with confirmation). The count in the confirmation covers every downloaded track of the playlist, protected tracks from SoundCloud's offline library included, and they are removed with the rest. Files left by an earlier install of Arsound belong to it for Android: one system question ("Allow Arsound to delete N audio files?") removes all of them at once. Music imported from the phone is not touched by this: it is deleted by hand, one track at a time.

Your own music

• Transfer from Yandex Music (Settings → Arsound → Your music → "Transfer from Yandex Music"; also from SoundCloud's own settings: "Import my music" → the "Transfer from Yandex Music" row, or "Import from another app" → the "Yandex Music" tile): a playlist, an album or liked tracks become a private SoundCloud playlist with the same name and order. Paste a link from Yandex Music's "Share" (a playlist, an album, the likes of an open profile), or sign in to Yandex and pick one of your own lists — closed likes and private playlists included. Arsound looks each track up on SoundCloud: the artist's own upload of the same length first; an upload by someone else counts only with the title and the length to a few seconds; previews, snippets, remixes, DJ edits and other versions are skipped. A playlist holds up to 500 tracks, so longer lists become "Title", "Title (2)"… The transfer goes on while the settings are closed, with a "Transfer from Yandex Music" notification, so the phone does not close the app in the middle of it; if the app was closed anyway, the transfer screen offers to go on. The tracks not found are listed under "Transferred" and can be copied as text. Tracks already looked up are remembered, so a stopped or repeated transfer goes quicker; the parts of a long list already made are not made again on a new try. When the connection is lost, the transfer stops with "No connection" instead of listing the remaining tracks as not found. The Yandex password is typed into Yandex's own page; Arsound keeps only the access token, on the phone, and sends it only to Yandex Music.
• Import audio files from the phone: from any playlist's menu, from "Import my music" or from the Arsound settings.
• Watch folder (Settings → Arsound → Your music → "Watch a folder"): new audio files in the chosen folder on the phone are imported by themselves when you open SoundCloud; when you pick the folder, what is already in it is imported too. Files imported earlier by hand (same name and size) are not copied a second time. Deleting a file from the folder does not touch the imported track.
• The "Imported" playlist with all your files. There is always exactly one: empty copies that old versions created after a reinstall are deleted from SoundCloud and disappear from the profile.
• Imported files are among your "Likes" too, as if you liked them: the newest on top, the heart filled, and they play from the likes screen like any other track (tap, "Shuffle", "Play all"); the header counts them, and searching the likes finds them by file name. Tapping the filled heart removes the file from the likes (the file itself stays in "Imported"); tapping again brings it back. All of this stays on this phone: nothing is written to SoundCloud's database or sent to the server. On by default; the separate switch "Imported tracks in Your likes" is in Settings → Arsound → Your music and does not depend on the "Imported" playlist. While it is on, a file whose title and cover are not read yet shows up in the likes a little later than the others (after the first launch or a big import), by itself. While it is off, the heart of an imported track does nothing.
• Imported tracks in a playlist have a note icon next to "⋮" — so you can tell them from SoundCloud tracks.
• "Set cover" in the "⋮" menu of an imported track: a picture from the gallery is cropped to a square and shown in lists and in the player, instead of the picture from the file. "Remove own cover" brings the old one back.
• A playlist or album without SoundCloud tracks (empty or made only of imported ones) has "Set cover" in its menu: the picture shows in the header and in the library, on this phone only. The "Recently played" card picks it up on the next launch. Without a custom cover such a playlist takes the cover of the first track added on the phone, the way SoundCloud does for server tracks.
• "Check track downloads" also counts tracks added to a playlist on the phone (including in bulk): a playlist made only of such tracks used to look empty — "Nothing to download".
• Old covers with black bars (a 16:9 video frame) are cropped to a square by themselves, once.
• If SoundCloud removes a track, it no longer vanishes from the playlist silently. Arsound remembers the contents of playlists and checks the missing track: a downloaded one becomes imported (the file is copied to "Imported") and returns to its former place; one that was not downloaded stays in place, greyed out — it can't be played, and tapping it explains why. A track that was simply removed from the playlist is forgotten as usual. Once a week downloaded tracks are additionally checked in full — this finds the ones removed before this feature existed (they appear in "Imported").
• Tracks and files can be added to any playlist, even someone else's — on your phone only, nothing is sent to the server.
• Your own order of playlists in the library and of tracks inside a playlist: hold a row and drag. Playback follows the same order.

Poor internet

• Playlists and albums open instantly: their contents are saved ahead of time as text, without music; the covers of the playlists themselves as small files.
• If a track breaks off because of the connection, the player retries the load by itself.
• The next track is loaded ahead (Settings → Arsound → Playback → "Load the next track ahead", on by default): while a track plays, the next one from the cloud is fetched whole into a temporary folder, so it starts at once and plays on without the network. Downloaded and imported tracks are already on the phone, so a mixed playlist only loads its cloud tracks. On Wi-Fi the next track is loaded after 8 seconds of the current one; on mobile data in the last minute and a half of it, so skipped tracks cost no data. "Wi-Fi only" and "Never" can be chosen too. Previews, subscription and DRM tracks and tracks longer than about half an hour are streamed as before; the temporary copies delete themselves and are not shown as downloads. SoundCloud's own preload fetched only the first 1920 bytes of the next stream.
• The next track from the network starts right away, without waiting for the notification cover: on a slow connection the old track no longer keeps playing while the player already shows the new one at 0:00.
• Each cover is downloaded once: the player, the notification and the lists that ask for it at the same time or within a minute get the same copy.
• Stream cache: SoundCloud keeps parts of tracks played over the network (120–500 MB). In Settings → Arsound → Storage and downloads you can choose a size from 250 MB to 20 GB and a retention period (1, 7, 30 or 90 days without listening), and clear the cache. Files are deleted at launch, before the player opens the cache; a cleared cache is removed in the background, so it does not hold up the start. The chosen size is limited by the free space: at least 1 GB stays free for other apps and downloads.
• Your own DNS (for example xbox-dns.ru), if your provider interferes with SoundCloud.
• The app can be forbidden to go online from an IP of chosen countries — both to SoundCloud and to Arsound search. Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan have a tick each (Russia is ticked by default), any other country can be added by its two-letter code. The country is checked again when the network or VPN changes and every 30 seconds while requests are running (both checks can be turned off and run by hand); if a check fails (unstable network, VPN reconnecting), requests wait for the next one instead of trusting the old answer. When there is no network or SoundCloud is disabled, a small crossed-out globe icon in the theme's colours appears at the bottom right above the player: a tap checks the network again, a long press explains what is going on.
• A track labelled "Not available in your country" has a "?" to the right of the label that wiggles now and then, inviting a tap. The tap explains that SoundCloud decided your account is Russian or from another country with blocks, and what to do: turn on a VPN with another country, clear the cache (Settings → Arsound → Updates and data → "Reset SoundCloud data") and turn on the block of requests from a Russian IP (Settings → Arsound → Network), so the label is not put on again. The window is in the colours of the chosen theme; the "Don't show again" tick with "OK" removes both the window and the icons (to bring them back: Settings → Arsound → Network → "Hint for "Not available in your country""). The icon is in track lists, playlists and on the track page.
• SoundCloud's device check no longer opens by itself on top of the app — it asks first.

Player

• Everything slowed (Settings → Arsound → Playback → Slowed, off by default): every track plays slower and lower, as in the "slowed" versions, on the fly and without extra files; the speed is 90 to 65 % (85 % is the usual slowed), the pitch follows it. A track whose title already says slowed, sped up or nightcore is left at its own speed. The lyrics and the progress bar stay right, they follow the track's own time. A round button in the full-screen player, left of the button that closes it, switches slowed on and off without going to the settings; it is tinted while slowed is on.
• Smooth transition between tracks (Settings → Arsound → Playback, off by default): the end of a track fades out, and the next track starts quietly and fades in, over 2 to 12 seconds (6 by default). Only when a track plays to its end; a track you pick or skip to starts at full volume. The player's volume changes, not the phone's.
• Pop-up comments can be hidden (Settings → Arsound → Playback → "Hide pop-up comments"): listeners' comments no longer pop up over the artwork while a track plays and are not marked on the waveform. Reading and writing comments stays.
• A play mode button in the media notification and on the lock screen, after the like: in order → repeat the queue → repeat the track → shuffle, each tap moves to the next mode, and the icon shows the current one. It changes the same play queue as the buttons in the player's "Next up" screen. Going from shuffle back to in order also works after autoplay or "Play next" added tracks (before, the mode stayed on shuffle).
• "Play along with other apps" (Settings → Arsound → Playback, off by default): music does not pause or get quieter when another app plays sound — a video, a voice message, a game or another player; both play. Calls still pause it, and it resumes after the call. Music also keeps playing while you record a voice message or a video.
• On Android 12L and older a like from the notification now changes the heart there at once (before, it changed only after a pause, so a second tap could not take the like back).
• The notification and the lock screen show the cover of the playing track (on Android 13+ they showed a SoundCloud placeholder). With the new player the notification can be put in the theme colours by turning off "Notification player in the track's colours" (on by default: on OnePlus, OPPO, vivo and others the control centre shows that picture as the cover, and the cover looked recoloured in the theme).
• The control centre and lock screen player of vivo phones (OriginOS) shows only the apps on its own list, and Arsound is not on it, so the player says "Not playing". On a vivo phone Arsound explains this on start (never over the greeting or another dialog; it has a "Do not show again" box) and gives a command for a computer with adb (it also runs on the phone itself over wireless debugging, for example in aShell with Shizuku); after it Arsound is on the list, and if a vivo update resets the list, Arsound adds itself back on start. The hint and the state: Settings → Arsound → Playback → "The vivo control centre player". Without a computer, there is a separate build for Chinese firmware (the Arsound-<version>-chinese-firmware.apk file in the Telegram channel): it uses a package name the vivo player already knows, so it shows in the control centre right away. It is a separate app next to the usual Arsound: you sign in to it again, and it has its own settings and downloads.
• New player (beta, Settings → Arsound → Appearance → "New player"): the full-screen player in the style of the chosen theme — the artwork fades into the theme colour at the top and under the waveform, the title and artist without black boxes and in the theme font, the waveform and time in the accent, the round buttons in dark glass. Works with every Arsound theme; the same switch turns it off.
• Sleep timer: in the full-screen player, "⋮" → "Sleep timer". Two modes, switched like the search source: "In time" (wheels for hours and minutes, buttons 15 min, 30 min, 1 h, 2 h) or "At a time" (a clock time; a time that has passed today means tomorrow). The window shows when the music stops; when the time comes, playback pauses. While the timer runs, the menu row shows the stop time, and the window can change or turn off the timer.
• Lyrics are looked up on LRCLIB, and when it has none or does not answer (it is often overloaded), one after another on NetEase Cloud Music, Kugou and lyrics.ovh (plain words without timings), the line under the words says where they come from. The button "Recognise with a neural network" is not dimmed while the music is paused and stands above the play button of the cover. A song whose lyrics are nowhere can be "heard" by a neural network right on the phone (Settings → Arsound → Offline and playback → "Lyrics recognition by a neural network", off by default). Under "No lyrics found" (and under "Could not load the lyrics", when LRCLIB is busy and NetEase gave nothing: LRCLIB is asked a second time before that) the lyrics page shows a "Recognise with AI" button: first it asks what language the song is in (Russian, English or another) — the answer decides which network listens; it is remembered for the artist and offered first next time. Then the feature turns on, downloads the components and the models once (they are not part of the APK; about 340 MB for the Russian model with voice separation, about 380 MB on a phone with a Snapdragon neural processor) and listens to the song on the phone; the sound is sent nowhere. First a separate network (UVR-MDX-NET Voc_FT) removes the music and keeps the voice, then the Russian model GigaAM v3 writes down the words: in our test on Russian songs about six words in ten come out right this way (about four without the separation, fewer than one with the earlier Whisper). On a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, 8 Gen 3 or 8 Elite (for example a Galaxy S23, S24 Ultra or S25) the voice is separated by the phone's neural processor, fifteen times faster than on the cores: on a Galaxy S25 Ultra a 2:09 song is done in about 12 seconds (8 for the voice, 4 for the words; the first time about 40 more seconds go to preparing the model for the processor). On other phones the cores do all of it, and it is heavy work even for a flagship: on the same phone without the processor a 3:25 track would take about 5 minutes and up to 1.5 GB of memory, on simpler phones several times longer; before the first download Arsound warns about it, and separately on a phone with less than 8 GB of memory or 8 cores. The voice separation can be turned off ("Take the voice out of the music"): faster, but more mistakes. While the recognition runs, the song can be paused or another one played: the work goes on, and the finished text is highlighted in time from any point. GigaAM hears only Russian; English and other songs are heard by Whisper small (375 MB more, downloaded when such a language is first chosen), and base stands in when there is not enough memory for small. Under recognised words there is a "Wrong language? Recognise again" button: the language is chosen again and the song is heard anew, the earlier text stays until the new one is ready. Sung-out choruses and heavily processed voices may come out as rubbish, and the work warms the phone and drains the battery (better while charging). The result is remembered, so a song is not processed twice. With the Russian model the lines are cut at the singer's pauses and light up with their first word; with Whisper the timing of the lines is rough, to within a couple of seconds. On 64-bit ARM phones (and x86-64: emulators, Chromebooks); for downloaded, imported and ordinary tracks, but not previews, subscription tracks or DRM-protected ones.
• Preamp (Settings → Arsound → Equalizer, on top): the overall volume from −12 to +12 dB in half-decibel steps, without changing the equalizer and with the equalizer turned off too. When boosting, a limiter keeps loud parts from distorting. Hold the row to set it back to 0. It is shaped by the player in software, like the equalizer, on any Android version.
• Equalizer (Settings → Arsound → Equalizer): 21 presets, as in popular players ("Bass boost", "Vocal", "Rock", "Electronic", "Jazz", "Lo-fi" and others), in a drop-down list with a picture of the curve for each, and a curve whose points you drag with your finger. You can save your own setting under your own name — it appears in the same list under "My presets", where it can be renamed or deleted. Changes the sound immediately, without a restart. The player shapes the sound itself, in software (ten bands, the preamp and a limiter in the player's audio chain), not through Android's system equalizer: it works on every phone, including HyperOS (Xiaomi), where the system equalizer does not attach, and sounds the same on any firmware. Levels saved by an older version on the phone's five bands are moved onto the ten bands.
• Arsound's windows (questions, list choices, text input) are styled in the colours of the chosen theme.
• Listening stats (Settings → Arsound → Listening statistics): how much time you listened, the most frequent tracks and artists over 7 days, 30 days, a year or all time. The totals stand in large type in a card of their own; the tops are ranked lists with the time and the plays on the right and a thin bar of the plays against the most played. A listen counts from 30 seconds; a pause does not split a listen into parts, even if the app was closed while paused. Works without internet too: track names come from the phone's memory. The artist is taken from a title like "Artist - Track", otherwise it is the uploader; different spellings of one artist ("CUPSIZE", "Cupsize") are counted together. Stored on the phone only; collection can be turned off and the history cleared.

Other

• Links to soundcloud.com (from a browser or a messenger) can open in Arsound: Settings → Arsound → Appearance → "Open SoundCloud links in Arsound" says whether they do and opens Android's "Open by default" page, where you choose "Add links" and tick the soundcloud.com addresses once. Android lets only SoundCloud's own app take these links by itself, so this one step is needed.
• Battery saving: fewer background requests.
• The "Your likes" home screen widget shows the covers instead of "Error: Attempt to invoke virtual method…": the server answers the default avatar with an error page, and SoundCloud's widget broke taking it for a picture (the original SoundCloud breaks the same way). Covers missing from the cache are downloaded by Arsound, through the app's own network settings (custom DNS, the block by IP country); a cover the server refuses is not asked for again for 6 hours.
• The heart in the SoundCloud player widget on the home screen takes the colour of the playing track's cover. For a grey cover or a track without one it takes the accent of the chosen Arsound theme, and with the "SoundCloud" look it stays SoundCloud's own heart. The colour is kept light enough or dark enough to stand out from the widget's card, and when the phone switches between its day and night look the widget updates by itself. It can be turned off in Settings → Arsound → Appearance ("Widget heart in the cover colour"); the widget updates at once.
• A square 2 × 2 player widget: in the launcher's widget list it is "Arsound 2×2". The cover fills the whole square, the title and the artist sit on its darkened bottom, under them the previous, play and next buttons, and the heart is in the top corner (white, pink when the track is liked). It shows the same track as SoundCloud's 4 × 1 widget and works the same way, whether that one is on the home screen or not; before anything played it shows the logo and opens the app on a tap.
• On first launch Arsound greets you: what the app is, where its settings are (Library → the gear in the top right → the topmost item "Arsound"), and which permissions it will ask for (notifications, music) and what stops working without each. Any of them can be declined. The greeting opens in English; the "EN / RU" switch in its bottom left corner changes its text at once, and when it is closed the whole app switches to the chosen language, without a restart (later it can be changed in Settings → Arsound → Appearance). The "Phone" permission that the original SoundCloud asked for is removed: the system pauses playback on a call anyway.
• Installs next to the original SoundCloud, with its own icon.
• Custom appearance (Settings → Arsound → Appearance): the themes "Scarlet" (Алый), "Cobalt", "Mint", "Sakura", "Lime" and "Winter" change the colours of the dark and light theme, the accent, the font, the rounding of covers and the mini-player, the splash colour and the loading animation. Each theme changes more than colours: its own icons, tab bar and mini-player, home greeting and glow, a "Your likes" strip in the theme's colour, the hearts behind the "Your likes" title and on the liked tracks in Downloads in the theme's accent (the picture at the top of "Your likes" and of the purchases page can be removed: Appearance → "No picture at the top of "Your likes""; the "Hello, … What shall we play?" greeting on the home screen: Appearance → "No greeting on the home screen"), icons in the Library, a glowing Play button in the player and playlists, and its own look of the Arsound settings. The app and Arsound screens are always dark, even if the phone uses the light theme; "Scarlet" is almost black with a red tint, font Golos Text. The start screen (the letter that draws itself on a dark background at launch) takes the theme's colours too. For the "Custom theme" it uses the nearest of the colours prepared in the app: exact for the default look and close for the others, because the system draws the start screen before the app runs and cannot be asked for an exact colour; everything else in the app shows your colours exactly. "SoundCloud" brings back the standard look. Themes are picked from a drop-down list where every theme shows its colours and animation. The app restarts after you choose.
• Each theme has its own light background animation: smouldering sparks for "Scarlet", stars with meteors for "Cobalt", fireflies for "Mint", falling petals for "Sakura", a scanner and shapes for "Lime", snowfall with turning crystals and golden glints and frost with icicles along the top edge for "Winter". It runs on the home screen and in the Arsound settings, freezes in battery-saving mode and starts again as soon as it is turned off, and can be turned off or slowed down in the same "Appearance" section.
• Wallpaper (Settings → Arsound → Appearance → "Wallpaper"): pick a picture from the Wallhaven catalogue, dim and blur it. It lies behind Arsound's screens and SoundCloud's main screens: home, library, search, playlists and the others that open over the tabs. The top bars are transparent, so the picture shows under them too; page headers do not cover it either: a playlist has a soft shade behind its title with no hard edges instead of a full-width blurred cover, and "Your likes" has no picture or band at the top at all: its title stands right on the wallpaper. A Go+ track that plays only as a preview has no solid fill in the lists either, and the home screen's blocks with genre filters over a grid of tracks ("Trending by genre") lie straight on the picture, without their tinted band; the same goes for the fades at the ends of horizontal lists, rows of tabs and the screen shown while a page loads. The band behind the top bar of a playlist (back button, "Search in …", filter) is chosen under the wallpaper sliders, from small phones drawn with your own wallpaper: as in SoundCloud, no band, translucent, fade, or frosted glass (the wallpaper under the bar strongly blurred, a sheen on top and a light line along the bottom). The picture comes from the Wallhaven catalogue or from your own gallery ("Your own picture from the gallery", the system photo picker); the rows under it say what they do: other wallpaper from Wallhaven, your own picture, remove the wallpaper. The player, the queue, the mini player, the tab bar, dialogs and sheets stay without the picture. Switching the wallpaper on or off rebuilds the main screen; a new picture, dim or blur shows at once. On Android below 11 the wallpaper, like the themes, is not shown behind SoundCloud's screens.
• Custom theme editor (Appearance → "Custom theme colours"): the drawing of the app (dark and light side by side when the theme follows the phone) and the Reset / Apply bar stay pinned while the mode, three colour tiles, the corner roundness and the animation tiles scroll under them. A colour opens a bottom sheet whose changes show live in the drawing, with a hex field, recent colours and named presets; Reset can be undone, and leaving with unapplied changes asks first.
• Wallhaven browser: three columns of picture-shaped cells with skeletons while they load, sorting chips that slide away on scroll, filters in a sheet (with the API key and the 18+ switch), and a full-screen preview with the real dim and blur sliders. Thumbnails are 300 pixels, so on a network that is not metered the cells that stay in view are made sharp from the full file (files up to 6 MB, kept in a cache of 150 MB); a file too big to fetch on its own says so in the preview. A thumbnail that did not load shows "!" instead of the shimmer and is tried again after 30 seconds or as soon as the network is back. Quick taps on the sorting chips go to Wallhaven as one request.
• Smooth player collapse (Settings → Arsound → Appearance → "Smooth player collapse", on by default): the player collapses and opens without the stutter it had on the way down, because the artwork is no longer redrawn needlessly on every frame of the slide. The theme animation also stands still while the player moves and goes on once it has stopped; over the open player it is not drawn. The lyrics do not slow the player's opening either: the lines are drawn without layers of their own, the blur of the cover grows in steps, and words already in memory are laid out once the player has stopped. Turned off, the player goes back to SoundCloud's own behaviour; a change applies from the next move of the player.
• Without Google Play services (Huawei phones with HarmonyOS, phones without Google) the app no longer shows "Device not compatible" on every start: sign-in (through the browser), search, playback, downloads and themes work without them.
• The SoundCloud interface is translated into Russian. The app language is chosen in the same "Appearance" section: as in the system, Russian or English. The home screen mixes arrive from the SoundCloud server in English.
• The Arsound mark is А9, the katakana ア drawn as two lines: the letter line and the accent line. At start the mark draws itself (the letter line from the start of each stroke, the accent line from its end), and the loading screens show the same drawing over and over while something loads.
• The icon can be changed: 141 variants with the А9 mark (each with an accent line in its tile's hue) — eight new ones (tile, letter, glow, deep, flowers, kawaii, night, sticker) in the six theme colours, solid, gradients, iridescent, a coloured letter, glowing and neon letters, space, glacier, paint splashes, comic, matrix, chrome and others, as well as an icon in the wallpaper colours (Android 12+), and SoundCloud's own 14 icons (the orange original, OG, black, chrome, tie-dye, leopard and others) (Settings → Arsound → App icon). Some launchers remove the shortcut from the home screen on a change — it can be brought back from the app list.
• Arsound update check: when a new version is out, the app offers to download the APK from the Telegram channel or the patches from GitHub. It downloads and installs nothing by itself.
• Logs for the developer: the playback log is always written and kept for two days, the detailed mod log is turned on separately (at most 2 MB). If something breaks — Settings → Arsound → Developer → "Save the logs": both logs are saved as one file in "Downloads" (if the app crashed, the file starts with the error that closed it and with how Android says the app's last processes ended), the app shows the path to the file and offers to send it. The file also has a short snapshot of the network and the phone (VPN, DNS, clock, browsers) and the system log of the app, with sign-in codes and tokens hidden. The same "Save logs" button is on the first sign-in page, in the top corner, so the logs can be sent when signing in does not work and the settings cannot be reached yet.

How to install

The easiest way is to download the ready APK from the Telegram channel t.me/arsound_git and install it.

Or build it yourself right on the phone, without a computer, through ReVanced Manager:

1. Install ReVanced Manager and the downloaders for it.
2. In Manager: "Patches" → ✏️ → "Add patches" → "Enter URL" → paste https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Allvoid/arsound/main/patches.json.
3. "Apps" → SoundCloud → "Patch". Manager downloads the right SoundCloud version, patches it and offers to install.

A detailed guide with an explanation of every step is in the description of the latest release. You don't need to uninstall the original SoundCloud — Arsound installs as a separate app. Arsound 0.9.3 and older used another package name and signing key, so the new version does not update them but installs next to them. Uninstall the old Arsound: its settings and downloaded tracks stay in it, the SoundCloud account and likes stay on the server.

To build the patches yourself or patch on a computer — BUILDING.md (in Russian).

FAQ

• "Not available in your country", although the track plays in the original app. Open Settings → Arsound → Updates and data → "Reset SoundCloud data". The reset takes a few seconds ("Resetting data…"), then the app restarts by itself. Your account sign-in, Arsound settings and imported music are kept.
• Android asks "Open with: SoundCloud / Arsound". Choose Arsound.
• A white placeholder with no title on a track — it is a subscriber-only track.

License

GNU General Public License v3.0, see LICENSE.

Based on ReVanced Patches © ReVanced, GPLv3. Taken from ReVanced, unchanged or with small changes: the shared extension library (extensions/arsound-shared), extension hookup and resource lookup (patches/shared/misc), bytecode utilities (util), the package-name change patch (patches/all/misc/packagename), Gradle build settings. The telemetry patch is reworked from ReVanced's patch of the same name. The rest in patches/soundcloud and extensions/arsound was written for this project.

Lyrics recognition by a neural network uses third-party components that are not part of the APK and are downloaded on request: sherpa-onnx (Apache-2.0; its Java classes are in extensions/arsound/src/main/java/com/k2fsa/sherpa/onnx), ONNX Runtime (MIT, inside the sherpa-onnx library and on its own for the voice separation; its Java classes are in extensions/arsound/src/main/java/ai/onnxruntime), Qualcomm's QNN libraries for the neural processor (Qualcomm AI Hub Model License; downloaded only to a Snapdragon phone that uses them), the GigaAM (MIT) and Whisper (MIT) models as converted by the sherpa-onnx authors, and the voice separation model UVR-MDX-NET Voc_FT of the Ultimate Vocal Remover project (MIT).

SoundCloud is a trademark of SoundCloud Global Limited & Co. KG. The project does not distribute SoundCloud's APK or code.