A Note on Pladio 1.4.3 — Better Song Identification, Fairer Pricing, and What Comes Next
Hi everyone,
Pladio 1.4.3 will be available on the App Store soon. This post is a heads-up about what's coming and what's already changed.
This update brings significant improvements to how Pladio identifies the songs you're listening to — and it also marks the start of a new direction for Pladio.
What's Coming in 1.4.3
Most radio stations send the song title and artist directly in the audio stream — when they do, Pladio displays it almost instantly. But many stations don't send this information, especially classical music stations, college radio, and stations that broadcast DJ sets or specialized programs.
For those cases, Pladio uses ACRCloud, a Shazam-like audio fingerprinting service, as a fallback. In 1.4.3, this fallback is now substantially faster and uses resources more efficiently:
The first identification attempt now happens about 12 seconds after you start listening (down from over 100 seconds in some cases)
Subsequent checks happen every 4 minutes regardless of result, instead of the unpredictable 2–3 minute pattern from before
Stations that send accented characters incorrectly (looking at you, beautiful classical music streams from southern Europe) now display correctly — no more "Félicien David" where it should read "Félicien David"
Diagnostic logs are also dramatically more compact, which helps me investigate your bug reports faster.
A Community Service with a Temporary Limit
Here's something I want to be transparent about: the audio fingerprinting fallback isn't free for me to operate. ACRCloud charges per request. I want to keep this feature available to everyone at no cost — it's one of the things that makes Pladio worth using, especially for classical music or specialty station listeners.
Thanks to Pladio's growing user base, the costs for this service have grown significantly. To keep it sustainable while I work on a better long-term solution, I've set a temporary daily limit on the number of fingerprint requests Pladio makes. This means later in the day, on stations that rely entirely on fingerprinting, song identification may temporarily pause until the daily quota resets the next day.
This is a deliberate trade-off. I'm offering the feature for free as a community service, and the temporary limit lets me do that responsibly while building something better. In Pladio 1.5, I'll introduce a redesigned approach to song identification that's both faster and far more economical to run — so this limit can go away.
A New Direction for Pladio
1.4.3 is also the first release under a new direction for Pladio. After years of feature-driven development, I've reached a point where I want to refocus on what really matters: usability, stability, and quality.
What that means in practice:
Fairer pricing — already live in the App Store. As of today, Pladio Premium is available at:
Monthly: USD 0.99
Annual: USD 9.99
Lifetime: USD 19.99
If you're already a Premium customer and would like to talk about a goodwill extension to thank you for your early support, please reach out — I'd be happy to arrange a one-year free Premium extension for you. Contact me at [email protected].
If you're currently on a Premium trial: the new price will simply apply at the end of your trial. No action needed.
Free stays free, ad-free stays ad-free. Everything that's currently free in Pladio remains free. The app is ad-free at every tier and will stay that way. Fingerprinting fallback (within the daily limit) stays free for everyone. Favorites, recents, manual stations, iCloud sync, widgets — all free.
Premium feature set is preserved. EQ, volume control, sleep timer presets, station alarm, Apple TV app, Apple Watch app — all stay Premium, all stay available.
Quality before features. Going forward, my development priority shifts. Usability, stability, and quality come first. New features will continue to arrive, both in the free tier and in Premium, but only after the foundation is genuinely solid.
Thank You, and Reach Out
Pladio exists because of the community of users who supported it through donations, beta testing, bug reports, translations, and feature suggestions. This new direction is about earning that support more honestly — with a product that does what it says it does, at a price that makes sense, built at a pace that prioritizes the things you actually use over flashy new features.
If you have any questions about 1.4.3, the new pricing, or anything else — please reach out at [email protected]. I read everything.
I'll continue posting updates as 1.5 takes shape. Until then — thank you for listening, and thank you for being patient with the daily limit on fingerprinting while I build something better.
Patrick
Indie Developer, KREANIQS
