VoiceStudio/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to OmniVoice Studio.

The format is loosely based on Keep a Changelog. Versions track the desktop app (tauri.conf.json + frontend/src-tauri/Cargo.toml). The bundled TTS model package (pyproject.toml) is versioned independently.

[Unreleased]

Added

• Tagged scripts auto-cast into a multi-voice podcast/audiobook. Paste a [Alice] … [Bob] … script into Stories and hit Auto-cast: it now recognizes the [Name] tag format (alongside the existing NAME: screenplay and quoted prose), builds the cast, and assigns a voice per character automatically. Editing one line only re-synthesizes that line on export (the chapter cache is content-addressed), and inline markers like [pause] / [voice:…] are never mistaken for speakers. (#487)
• A dedicated Contact page. Discord, email, GitHub issues, and the project website (palash.dev) as clean one-tap rows, reachable from the footer — so reaching the maker is never more than a click away.

Changed

• Donations now go through Ko-fi or PayPal (GitHub Sponsors removed). GitHub Sponsors isn't available, so the Support page no longer routes there: pick an amount (now $10 / $20 / $50) and then choose Ko-fi or PayPal — PayPal carries the amount straight into checkout. .github/FUNDING.yml and the README badges were updated to match.
• Simplified the Commercial License page. Trimmed the six-tile benefit grid and FAQ down to the three things that actually drive the decision (you own the output, no per-minute cost, direct support) plus one clear "request a quote" contact — less wall-of-text, faster to act on.

Fixed

• Dubbing a URL no longer fails with [Errno 22] Invalid argument on Windows. yt-dlp stamps the downloaded file's modified-time with the video's upload date; an out-of-range/invalid timestamp makes the os.utime call raise [Errno 22] and aborts the whole URL ingest. OmniVoice downloads to a throwaway file and never uses its mtime, so it now skips the stamp entirely (updatetime=False). (#642)

• Dubbing a YouTube link that 403s now retries with a different player client. Some videos serve their formats signature-protected to the default player client, so the media download fails with HTTP Error 403: Forbidden even though extraction worked — and a plain retry keeps 403ing. The URL download now escalates the YouTube player client (tv → android → web_safari) on a 403, which commonly bypasses it, before surfacing the actionable error. (#625)

• A synth glitch that produced unreadable audio is now caught instead of a misleading "out of memory". A numerical glitch in the model (seen on Apple Silicon/MPS) could leave NaN/∞ samples, which wrote a WAV that then failed decoding with an opaque ffmpeg returned error code: 183 / Invalid data — and the generic error handler labelled it "ran out of memory". Non-finite samples are now sanitized to silence before any encode (so the WAV is always decodable), and a genuine decode failure is reported as "unreadable audio — Flush and regenerate", not OOM. (#629)

• A silent startup hang now leaves a diagnostic instead of nothing. On some setups the backend could load all model weights and then hang forever before "Application startup complete" — no error, no crash, an unusable app (reported as a Mac M1 hang after Loading weights: 527/527, #632). A startup watchdog now dumps every thread's stack to the error log if startup stalls past a window (default 5 min, OMNIVOICE_STARTUP_WATCHDOG_S to tune, 0 to disable), so the deadlock is captured rather than invisible. It's disarmed the instant startup finishes, so a normal (even slow-first-download) boot never trips it. (#632)

• First-run demo voice is back. The bundled demo clip (backend/assets/samples/demo_voice.wav) was a build artifact that never got committed, so it shipped absent — onboarding logged "Demo audio not found" and seeded nothing, leaving a brand-new install with an empty Launchpad and no /demo_audio route. The clip is now committed (it's already un-ignored and bundled via the Tauri backend resource), so first-run seeds the demo voice on every platform; onboarding still degrades gracefully (with a regenerate hint) if it's ever absent. (#621)

• Multi-speaker dubbing: two speakers' turns merged onto one line are now split apart. Segmentation groups words into sentences before diarization runs, so a back-and-forth exchange could land in a single segment; the speaker pass then only relabelled that segment with its majority speaker, losing the turn boundary (the second half of #486; the per-speaker voice auto-assign was fixed earlier in #490). A new post-diarization pass re-splits any segment whose words span more than one speaker at the word-level boundary, assigning each piece its own speaker. Single-speaker segments pass through byte-for-byte unchanged, so single-speaker dubs and their timing never move, and a lone mis-attributed word (diarization noise) is smoothed rather than causing a spurious split. (#486)

• Designed voices saved with a bad style no longer render wrong or crash generation. A designed voice could persist an instruct the engine validator rejects — either the literal "[object Object]" from an old build, or freeform prose typed into the style field — which made every generation or dub that used the voice fail with Unsupported instruct items found in … (surfacing to users as a 400/500 and, when it tore down mid-render, "Can't reach the local backend"). The previous fix only blanked "[object Object]", which silently dropped the design — so an Indonesian female voice came out male. Now the stored instruct is sanitized down to valid tags at every seam (save, edit, and when a profile drives Generate or Dub), and when the stored value is unusable the tags are rebuilt from the design's saved category picks (vd_states) so the intended gender/age/pitch/accent survive. A migration (0007) heals existing poisoned profiles in place — no reinstall, no manual fix. (#550 #571 #594 #596)

• "Transcribe stream dropped … Likely ASR backend failed to load" now shows the real reason. When transcription failed to load its ASR model (the reported case was WhisperX on Windows — typically a faster-whisper / CTranslate2-cuDNN mismatch, a missing model download, or the torch-2.6 weights-only VAD regression), the UI dead-ended on a generic "stream dropped" message with no actionable cause. Two root causes: (1) WhisperX loads lazily inside transcription, so the load failure was buried in per-chunk errors and retried on every chunk; the transcribe pre-flight now eagerly loads the ASR model (new ASRBackend.ensure_loaded()), surfacing the genuine cause once, up front, as a structured error. (2) Pre-flight and audio-load errors closed the SSE stream with a bare error and no terminal done, so the browser's native EventSource connection-drop could race and win against the structured error — discarding the real cause and falling back to the generic message; every terminal error now emits done, and the frontend latches the structured cause so a connection drop can't overwrite it. Net: WhisperX load failures are diagnosable instead of a silent dead-end. Fail-before/pass-after regression test included. (#578)

• Dubbing: the PLAY button on the dubbed-video preview did nothing. Same autoplay-policy trap that #510 fixed for the standalone audio player, but the dub editor's timeline player was missed. WaveSurfer builds its AudioContext at mount — before any user gesture — so on Windows WebView2 (and Linux Firefox/Chrome, Android Chrome) it stays "suspended"; playPause() then resolves with no sound and the preview just sits there. Every playback entry point in the dub timeline (the toolbar Play button and the per-segment "play this slot") now resumes the context via the shared unlockAudio() on the click before starting playback, and swallowed play() rejections are logged instead of hidden. A source-contract regression test pins the invariant so a future refactor can't quietly reintroduce a silent play path. macOS is unaffected (its context was never blocked). (#595)

• Voice design: the script text field couldn't be expanded. The Script textarea was a flex: 1 item inside a flex column, so flex-grow recomputed its height on every reflow and snapped the user's drag back — resize: vertical is silently ignored on a flex-grown item in Chromium/WebView2. The field now owns its own height (starts taller, and the corner grip grows it reliably on every platform). (#595)

• An interrupted model download now self-repairs instead of dead-ending. When the OmniVoice TTS cache was missing weight shards (the usual aftermath of an interrupted first download), the next synthesize failed with a 500 and a "delete the model and install it again" instruction — a manual dead-end. The backend now detects the truncated-cache error on load, re-fetches just the missing files via snapshot_download (already-present blobs are skipped, so a near-complete cache repairs in seconds and a healthy cache is never touched), and retries the load automatically. Offline mode (HF_HUB_OFFLINE) is respected — repair never makes a network call the user opted out of — and if the re-fetch still can't fix it, the actionable delete-and-reinstall message is preserved as the fallback. (#581)

• Dubbing a YouTube URL no longer dies on a transient "Broken pipe." Pasting a video link could fail outright with download: Unable to download video: [Errno 32] Broken pipe — a broken pipe raised while the write side of a pipe closes mid-stream (a killed ffmpeg merge child, a CDN reset during muxing). yt-dlp's own per-fragment retries don't cover that case, so a single transient blip aborted the whole ingest. The URL download now retries up to twice on broken-pipe / network-drop failures, wiping the partial download between attempts, and only surfaces the (already-actionable) "connection dropped — just retry" hint after the retries are exhausted. Unsupported links still fail fast with their own hint — no wasted retries. (#579, #598)

• No module named 'omnivoice' on installs whose venv lost its editable record. An interrupted or offline uv sync (common during an in-place upgrade) could install all dependencies yet never lay the editable install of the project's own omnivoice package — or an antivirus quarantine could remove it. The venv still started uvicorn, so the bootstrap's health gate passed it through, and the app only failed at the first generate/dub with No module named 'omnivoice'. The bootstrap now also verifies omnivoice is importable (via a cheap find_spec, no torch load) and forces a repair uv sync that re-lays the editable install when it isn't; the backend also resolves omnivoice from its bundled source tree at runtime as a safety net. No reinstall needed — relaunch and it self-repairs. (#564)

• "cannot schedule new futures after shutdown" no longer breaks generate/dub after a slow first load. When a model load timed out, the backend reset its GPU worker pool to recover — but several request handlers had captured the old pool object at import time and kept submitting to it, so every subsequent generate, dub, transcribe, or translate failed with cannot schedule new futures after shutdown (a 500, or "Can't reach the local backend" when it took the worker down). The GPU pool is now a single self-healing handle whose worker pool is rebuilt on demand, so a reset can never strand an in-flight or later request. No settings change; the recovery is automatic. (#589 #599)

CI

• Feature-coverage test system. A backend route-inventory test diffs all 213 HTTP/WebSocket endpoints against a committed snapshot (plus a critical-endpoint guard and a route-count floor), and a frontend feature-coverage test asserts every app mode is wired to a page and every feature has its i18n namespace — so an endpoint or page silently disappearing now fails CI on every PR.

[0.3.7] — 2026-06-20

A stabilization release that clears the wave of issues reported on the 0.3.6 line — across voice design, dubbing, transcription, install, and the Linux/web UI — and lands two more opt-in cloning engines. The throughline is non-English correctness and cross-platform playback: cloned and designed voices now hold their language end-to-end, and audio plays inline in Linux/Android browsers, not just macOS. It also carries the v0.3.6 startup-crash fixes, so anyone still hitting "Can't reach the local backend" on v0.3.5/v0.3.6 only needs to update.

Added

• Two opt-in heavyweight TTS engines: MOSS-TTS-v1.5 (8B) and dots.tts (2B). Both are zero-shot voice-cloning engines, each running in its own isolated subprocess venv (they pin a transformers version that conflicts with the parent's >=5.3 — MOSS ==5.0, dots.tts ==4.57) via the same dedicated-venv pattern as IndexTTS-2, so they can't disturb the default install or its lockfile. Point OMNIVOICE_MOSS_TTS_V15_DIR / OMNIVOICE_DOTS_TTS_DIR at a local clone to enable. CUDA/CPU only — neither claims Apple-Silicon MPS, and dots.tts is gated off on Windows (upstream is Linux/macOS only). See docs/engines/moss-tts-v15.md and docs/engines/dots-tts.md. (#498)

Fixed

• Non-English voices drifted to English / the wrong language. Three independent root causes, all in the language path: (1) a voice profile's stored language was never read back into generation, so a German archetype that previewed in German generated in English (the preview passed the language; the user's Generate call didn't); (2) the audiobook/longform synth hardcoded language=None, letting the engine re-autodetect per chunk so a non-English clone could flip language mid-render on short/ambiguous lines; and (3) the duration estimator weighted Unicode combining marks at zero, so decomposed (NFD) diacritic text — common for Vietnamese — under-allocated frames and came out rushed. The profile/request language is now threaded through both the single-shot and longform paths (request wins, profile fills the gap), and text is NFC-normalized before duration estimation. Each fix has a fail-before/pass-after regression test. (#533, #505, #502)
• Audio playback on Linux Firefox/Chrome and Android Chrome. Two separate root causes both masquerade as "the play button doesn't work" on non-macOS browsers — and both are invisible when developing on macOS, which is why they shipped. (1) The backend served .wav / .flac with Python's default audio/x-wav / audio/x-flac (vendor-experimental, never IANA-registered); macOS CoreAudio MIME-sniffs leniently and plays anyway, but Linux FFmpeg and Android ExoPlayer strictly honor the declared type and prompt to download. Fixed by registering the canonical audio/wav / audio/flac types before any StaticFiles mount. (2) WaveSurfer's AudioContext is constructed at component-mount time — i.e. before any user gesture — so on Linux FF/Chrome and Android Chrome it stays suspended, decodeAudioData hangs, the ready event never fires, and the play button never enables. macOS Safari/Chrome auto-resume on first interaction. Fixed by patching window.AudioContext to track every instance and resuming them on the first pointerdown / keydown / touchstart, plus resuming inline on the play click itself. The MIME fix has a backend regression test; the unlock path has a Vitest unit test covering idempotency, post-unlock contexts, and error isolation. (#510)
• Voice Studio "Save design as profile" poisoned the profile with "[object Object]" and then 400'd every generation ("Unsupported instruct items found in [object Object]"). The save passed the instruct builder object to the form instead of its string. Fixed at the source + defended with a coercion helper; the engine now tolerates the sentinel, and a migration heals already-saved profiles. (#550, #545, #542, #537, #530, #525)
• Profile / persona / consent endpoints 500'd with no such column: consent_audio_path (and the same class for kind/vd_states/…) after an in-place upgrade. The alembic migration existed but couldn't always apply (stamped at a removed revision, or alembic not importable) and the failure was swallowed. The runtime schema now self-heals — it ADDs any missing additive column from the canonical schema on startup. (#552, #547)
• Stories: the global reading-speed slider was ignored by preview and stem export. The #415 global speed only flowed through the full longform export; per-segment preview and stem export still resolved a hardcoded track.speed || 1.0, so audio played at 1.0× even with the global set to e.g. 0.70×. A shared effectiveSpeed(track, global) helper (per-line override → global → engine default) now drives all three generation paths. (#508)
• Generate / Settings / Clone buttons were missing / unpressable on Linux. The UI-scale fix round-trips correctly on Chromium, but older WebKitGTK treats zoom as a layout no-op, leaving a ~23% black band that pushed the bottom CTAs off-screen. The shell now probes the engine and fills the window when zoom doesn't lay out. (#523, #524)
• Settings tabs with little content rendered as a stunted box in a black void (reported on Appearance). The page is now a flex column with a min-height floor — short tabs fill the panel, tall tabs grow and scroll exactly as before. The Appearance panel's previously hardcoded English strings ("UI scale", "Color theme", "Font") were also routed through i18n, per the localization rule. (#507)
• The engine "Install" button 500'd with "No virtual environment found." uv pip install now targets the running interpreter (--python sys.executable) instead of relying on a venv it couldn't auto-discover. (#529, #527)
• Transcription failed with "no segments" on GPUs without efficient float16. Both CTranslate2 ASR backends now fall back float16 → int8 instead of crashing at model load; a transcribe stream can no longer close without a terminal error event; and an incomplete transformers install reports an actionable message instead of "Could not import module 'AutoFeatureExtractor'". (#551, #549, #516)
• Audiobook import 500'd with 'AudiobookPlan' object has no attribute 'chapter_count' for every format (.txt/.md/.epub/.pdf). (#543)
• Windows: generated audio auto-played in a separate, un-closeable black window. Renders now play in-app through the shared playback manager. (#532)
• Cryptic video-download errors now carry actionable hints: an unsupported link shape ("paste a direct video page, not a share/feed link") vs a transient network drop ("just retry — the partial download was cleaned up"). (#554, #536)
• A relocated, copied, or restored backend venv ("No module named 'encodings'") now self-heals (rebuilds once) instead of failing on every launch.
• The donate goal bar showed fabricated progress ($137.50 / $200, 23 sponsors). It now reflects the real figures ($10 / $200, 1 sponsor) in both the runtime JSON and the TypeScript fallback. (#513)
• The "Can't reach the local backend" startup-crash wave (pkg_resources #248, scalar_fastapi #307, exit-106 broken venv) was fixed in v0.3.6 — this release carries those fixes, so updating from v0.3.5/older resolves them.

Changed

• Version is now single-sourced from frontend/package.json. Five hand-maintained literals drifting is exactly what shipped a 0.3.6 build that called itself 0.3.5. package.json is canonical (vite already injects it as __APP_VERSION__), tauri.conf.json reads its bundle version from it ("version": "../package.json"), and the remaining toolchain-required mirrors (Cargo.toml, pyproject.toml, the frozen-backend fallback) are CI-guarded to stay in lockstep. (#503)
• Updater: the Preview channel actually tracks main again. It was stuck at 0.3.5-41 because its only build trigger was a manual dispatch; a nightly rebuild now enforces "preview = main" (no-opping on days main didn't move). Two latent hazards are closed: the preview release is re-asserted as a prerelease every run (a non-prerelease preview could hijack the Stable channel's "Latest"), and its manifest can no longer silently drop the Intel-Mac (darwin-x86_64) target. (#500)

Internal

• The frozen desktop backend reported 0.3.5 regardless of its real version. In a synced env, core.version.APP_VERSION resolves from package metadata (correct, so CI stayed green), but the PyInstaller-frozen build has no .dist-info, hit PackageNotFoundError, and fell back to a hardcoded literal. The spec now bundles omnivoice metadata so the primary path works frozen too, and the resolution chain is metadata → pyproject → named fallback. This also fixes About → Version rendering blank in the web/Pinokio build (no Tauri, backend idle), which now falls back to the build-time version. (#501)

[0.3.6] — 2026-06-16

A large release (168 commits since v0.3.5). The headline is the Longform suite — produce full audiobooks and multi-voice stories from text, EPUB, or PDF — alongside a real engine-routing layer that tells you up front when an engine will fall back to CPU instead of finding out mid-synth. Dubbing, first-run, and install reliability all get a pass too.

Added

• Longform: Stories + Audiobook editors. Two new tabs turn long text into finished audio. Audiobook takes a script (or imports plain text / EPUB / PDF), auto-splits it into chapters, and renders a chaptered .m4b with metadata, cover art, and per-chapter preview/resume. Stories is a multi-voice editor — assign a different voice per line, preview, and export the whole thing through the same server-side renderer. Both share one render core (loudness, metadata, cover art) and one live SSE progress stream, and you can convert a project between Story and Audiobook in place. (#402, #403, #404, #408, #409, #411, #412, #413, #426, #435, #436, #447)
• Longform: PDF & EPUB ingest. "Import" on the Audiobook tab accepts EPUB and PDF (not just plain text) and auto-chapters the result, so an existing ebook becomes an audiobook without manual copy-paste. (#412, #459)
• Longform: two-pass loudnorm mastering. Audiobook/Story exports now run a measure-then-normalize loudnorm pass for accurate ACX/podcast loudness targets. A slow or broken measure pass degrades gracefully to single-pass rather than aborting the render. (#449, #455)
• Longform: crash-resume. An interrupted render is resumable without re-submitting the original input — the compiled plan is persisted to the job dir and finished chapters are reused, so a crash mid-book doesn't cost you the whole render. (#470)
• Longform: pronunciation control + SSML-lite prosody. A per-render pronunciation lexicon (word respelling) plus an in-app pronunciation editor and markup reference, and inline prosody markers — [slow] / [fast] / [emphasis] / [spell] — for fine-grained delivery. (#419, #421, #422)
• Stories: global reading-speed control. A toolbar slider (0.5–2.0×) sets one speed for every line that doesn't have its own per-line override; the per-line slider still wins. Persisted as a UI preference. (#415, #416)
• Unified LongformProject store. Audiobook metadata, scripts, and prefs persist in a single project store (with a v4→v5 migration), and finished books/stories now show up alongside other work in Projects. (#417, #443, #444)
• Portable personas (.ovsvoice). Export any voice as a self-contained, fully-local persona bundle — identity, optional reference clip, consent attestation, SPDX license, and a watermarked preview — and import it back into another OmniVoice install. A privacy toggle ships a preview-only bundle so no raw recording of your voice has to travel. Verified-own-voice status can't be forged by hand-editing a bundle (real recording + consent text + attestation required). Legacy .omnivoice files still import. See docs/persona-format.md. (#29)
• Engine routing — no more silent CPU fallback. A host device probe and routing resolver now decide where each engine actually runs, and the verdict is surfaced before you hit Synthesize: the Settings → Engines picker shows a per-engine compatibility matrix, and preflight / diagnose report the active engine's GPU verdict (accelerated / caveat / CPU-fallback / unavailable). At synth time every TTS entry point (/generate, /v1/audio/speech) enforces the same routing — an engine that can't use this host's GPU returns an explicit error or an X-OmniVoice-Routing header instead of silently dropping to CPU or dying mid-synth. (#21)
• Diagnostics suite. New self-check tooling for when something's wrong: a /system/diagnose report (and matching backend --diagnose), a persistent error journal surfaced in Settings, and a scrubbed diagnostic bundle (home dirs stripped to ~/, no tokens/keys) you can attach to a bug report. Paired with structured GitHub Issue Forms (bug / install / feature) for cleaner reports. (#433, #456)
• Dubbing: multi-speaker per-speaker voice assignment. When diarization detects multiple speakers, each segment is now bound to its speaker's cloned voice automatically instead of landing on "Default" and needing manual fixes; per-segment reference clips are still preferred for quality where present. Also adds an optional speaker-count hint for diarization. (#275, #486, #490)
• Dubbing: Smart Fit timing + second-pass QC. A Smart Fit timing strategy (planner, fingerprints, per-segment video retime + drift absorption + fitted subtitles) plus a second-pass ASR QC that flags lines whose dub drifts from the target timing — wired into the dub editor UI. Includes a timeline segment editor (drag, snap-to-onset, keyboard a11y), speech-onset alignment, regional dialect targeting, and per-segment clone references. (#280, #347, #350, #369, #370, #458)
• Dubbing: dedicated Dub home. A projects/history landing for dubbing with project rename. (#435)
• Voice Console workspace. Clone and Design are consolidated into one Voice workspace with right-side panels, a shared waveform player, an identity recipe line / Active-voice card, and a free-text "describe your voice" field that maps natural language to design parameters. (#317, #374, #376, #378, #395, #396, #397)
• Unified first-run setup. Nothing installs until you confirm a plan: pick an install mode (installed / portable), a storage location, and (on restricted networks) custom PyPI/HF/python-build-standalone mirrors — with a minimum-free-space gate before anything downloads. Followed by a guided studio-console wizard with platform-aware hints, resume reassurance, and download ETAs. (#286, #295, #297, #298)
• Dictation: local-LLM refinement. Opt-in local-LLM cleanup of final transcripts (collapsing Whisper hallucination loops), available on both live dictation and the REST /transcribe path; plus opt-in NLMS acoustic echo cancellation for dictating over playback. Configure a remote LLM endpoint (Ollama / vLLM / LM Studio) in Settings. (#356, #357, #363, #399, #400, #457)
• Unlimited-length TTS + streaming. Sentence-boundary chunking with crossfade removes the per-generation length cap, and a new sentence-by-sentence /ws/tts streams audio as it's produced. An inline [pause Nms] marker inserts measured silence in generated speech. (#276, #357, #358)
• MCP server v1. OmniVoice mounts an MCP server on /mcp (with a stdio shim and per-agent voice binding) so it can act as a local TTS/STT provider for agentic pipelines. (#368)
• Remote-backend access. Point the desktop UI at a remote backend URL with a bearer key (Tailscale-documented), and an opt-in Hugging Face token field in the setup flow. (#303, #364)
• "Fund Claude Max" support experience. The donate page gets a real goal bar with a "Join N supporters" social-proof line and suggested amounts, plus Pip the mascot and a non-blocking "postcard" toast that appears only after a success (a finished dub, a saved clone, a longform export) — never on errors, setup, or first run — with escalating cooldowns and a one-click "don't ask again". (#494)

Fixed

• Transcription/dubbing failed when ffmpeg wasn't on PATH (notably on Windows). WhisperX now decodes audio through OmniVoice's own validated ffmpeg binary instead of a bare PATH lookup, so ASR works without a system ffmpeg install. (#479)
• Translation defaulted the source language to English. Dubbing/translation now guesses the source language from the text instead of assuming en, fixing wrong-direction translations. (#478)
• Cinematic / LLM dubbing features failed out of the box because openai wasn't bundled. The client is now a runtime dependency, so those paths work on a fresh install. (#484)
• pkg_resources missing install dead-end (#248). The auto-repair ran uv pip install setuptools, which uv treated as a no-op when setuptools metadata was present but its files had been removed (commonly by Windows Defender quarantine or a partial extract). Both repair sites now use --reinstall to force re-extraction, and the error/hint text suggests the working command plus an antivirus-exclusion note. (#248)
• A stuck backend trapped users on a buttonless splash (#474). The bootstrap splash now has a per-stage stall watchdog: if a non-terminal stage sits past its budget (20 min for dep install, 120 s otherwise), it flips to the failed state with actionable hints, the live log, and Retry / Clean-&-Retry — instead of polling forever with no way out. (#474)
• Changing the model-download location in Settings had no effect (#480). The desktop launcher injected a stale models dir that overrode the per-user value, so new downloads kept going to the old folder and "Effective location" stayed wrong. The per-user env file now wins, so the in-app Settings path is authoritative. (#480)
• Backend crashed on app upgrade with a stale venv (#307). Dependencies are now synced on upgrade, and a structurally broken venv self-heals instead of exiting 106. scalar_fastapi is now optional so its absence can't break startup. (#307, #314)
• /generate ignored the selected TTS engine (#312) and GGUF speech-control parameters weren't forwarded — both now honored. (#306, #312)
• TTS generation failed on some GPUs. torch.compile failures now fall back to eager execution so generation never hard-fails on unsupported GPUs, and cudagraph-compiled inference is pinned to one dedicated thread to avoid crashes. (#278, #315)
• Re-dub ignored transcript edits (#281). Fingerprints are canonicalized, the preview cache is busted, and the mux is atomic, so editing the transcript and re-dubbing actually reflects your changes. Translated subtitles now burn in correctly and subtitle save no longer throws a JSON error. (#281, #309)
• macOS: app wouldn't open without using Terminal. Builds are now ad-hoc signed (with signing/notarization verification), so the app launches normally. (#290)
• macOS dictation auto-paste stole focus; it now writes the clipboard natively without grabbing focus, and microphone-permission handling adds OS usage descriptions, a WebView grant handler, and an actionable denied-state UI. (#287, #323)
• Clone-reference transcription was broken (it used a removed transformers pipeline); it now routes through the ASR registry. A crash-isolated faster-whisper subprocess backend keeps an ASR crash from taking down the app. (#308, #393)
• Realtime status probe hit a gated route. It now probes the auth-exempt /health instead of the gated /model/status, and the UI polls the backend over HTTP before opening the WebSocket to avoid startup ECONNREFUSED. (#439, #450)
• Non-executable or unreachable engine binaries showed cryptic errors — these now produce actionable messages. (#437, #438, #454, #466)
• Design-profile save was coupled to a TTS render (#476), so saving a profile needlessly triggered synthesis; the two are now decoupled. (#476)
• UI scale / black bands. The app shell now scales via transform: scale and always fills the viewport, fixing the WebKitGTK black-band issue on Linux and cramped/black layouts at narrow widths — a permanent fix across platforms. (#445, #452)
• Clone popover/CTA clipping and a non-resizable textarea are fixed, the WaveformPlayer no longer pauses itself on play or ignores clicks, and several layout/history-display issues (phantom sidebar gap, title clamping, flicker) are cleaned up. (#379, #384, #398, #481)
• Windows: desktop-prod now runs from cmd/PowerShell via a cross-platform launcher, tqdm is disabled on non-TTY to avoid an OSError, and ffmpeg validation guards against WinError 193. (#282, #305, #377)
• MLX import hardened against PyInstaller dylib failures, with a proper platform gate so it's only loaded where it works. (#390)

Changed

• Restricted-network support. A Hugging Face mirror (HF_ENDPOINT) setting, custom PyPI / HF / python-build-standalone mirrors in first-run setup, and region presets help installs complete behind restrictive networks. (#286, #391)
• Engine memory management. Subprocess-engine sidecars now unload on demand and idle-reap to free VRAM. (#401, #406)
• Faster, more accurate model downloads via a Xet fast path with accurate progress reporting, plus a model-management cleanup pass. (#424, #428)
• Voice profiles unified under one model with a kind discriminator and stored design params, and consent-locked profiles (verified_own_voice + spoken-consent flow). (#354, #376)
• Updater preview channel now offers the newest build across channels, and preview versions carry an MSI-legal numeric pre-release stamp. (#293, #326)
• Performance. Voice-clone prompt embeddings are cached, and dub retime batches seek to their window instead of decoding from frame 0. (#387, #427)

License

• Relicensed from FSL-1.1-ALv2 to AGPL-3.0 (open-core). The project is now under the GNU Affero General Public License v3, with a paid commercial license retained for proprietary/closed-source use without AGPL obligations. The bundled omnivoice/ TTS model package stays Apache-2.0 upstream (AGPL-compatible). Manifests declare AGPL-3.0-only; the in-app Commercial License copy and README are updated, and the old "converts to Apache 2.0 after two years" FAQ is removed. In-app commercial-license strings are translated across all 20 locales. (#292)

CI

• macOS Intel (x86_64) build target reinstated on macos-15-intel, so Intel Mac users get installers again. (#342)
• Docker Hub publishing. Images now also publish to Docker Hub (palashdeb/omnivoice-studio), with the Docker Hub overview maintained in-repo and auto-synced from main (sync is non-fatal so it can't redden a build). (#375, #410, #414)
• Docs-drift guard. A daily job compares the canonical feature inventory against README / docs / registries to catch stale docs. (#353)
• Security scans never cancel on main, so merge trains no longer leave red ✗ on intermediate commits. (#340)

[0.3.5] — 2026-06-03

Fixed

• Speaker diarization failed on PyTorch ≥ 2.6 (Weights only load failed … Unsupported global: torch.torch_version.TorchVersion) even with the pyannote license accepted. PyTorch 2.6 made torch.load default to weights_only=True, whose secure unpickler rejects the pyannote checkpoint's metadata globals. The diarization loader now registers the same safe-globals allowlist the WhisperX VAD load already uses, so the secure load succeeds. (#270)

[0.3.4] — 2026-06-03

Fixed

• Transcription on Windows + NVIDIA failed with Could not locate cudnn_ops_infer64_8.dll. WhisperX/faster-whisper need cuDNN 8 (via CTranslate2); when the side-loaded cudnn8_compat libs are missing, the PyTorch Whisper backend (Settings → Models) now works as a drop-in fallback — it builds its own transformers pipeline on PyTorch's cuDNN-9 stack, with no CTranslate2/cuDNN-8 dependency and no OMNIVOICE_PRELOAD_TTS_ASR=1 required. (#255)

[0.3.3] — 2026-06-03

Fixed

• Settings → About showed the wrong architecture in the Docker/web build. The "Architecture" row rendered the client browser's platform (navigator.platform → e.g. "Win32"); it now reports the server's CPU architecture from the backend (platform.machine()), correct for both the desktop app and Docker. The blank version/GPU/RAM/VRAM in the same report were the loopback-gate 403s already fixed in v0.3.2. (#262)

CI

• The release SHA-256 checksum step no longer uses mapfile (a bash 4+ builtin) — it broke on the macOS runner's bash 3.2 and dropped the macOS SHA256SUMS for v0.3.1/v0.3.2. Now portable to bash 3.2.

[0.3.2] — 2026-06-03

Fixed

• "Loopback origin required" all over the Docker UI (and a blank version). The /system/* and /api/settings/* routes are restricted to a loopback origin, but Docker's NAT makes every request look non-loopback, so the gate 403'd the operator out of the admin UI — including /system/info (blanking the version) and HF-token entry. The Docker image now runs with OMNIVOICE_SERVER_MODE=1, which relaxes the gate for the headless deployment; exposure is governed by the -p port mapping plus the optional share PIN. Desktop builds are unaffected — their loopback boundary (and the denial of admin routes to LAN share guests) is unchanged. (#261)

[0.3.1] — 2026-06-03

First tagged build of the 0.3 line off main — it ships the accumulated [0.3.0] work below plus the fixes here. (The [0.3.0] milestone heading is kept for the qualitative "actually useful" release.)

Fixed

• Voice-clone / export download crashed in the Docker & browser build with TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'invoke'). The export button called the Tauri save dialog unconditionally; outside the desktop shell it now falls back to a standard browser download of the file served at /audio/<path>. (#256)
• Docker container showed no version (a dash) in Settings → About, and the desktop-only update-channel toggle appeared in the web build. The running version is now read from the backend (/system/info app_version, /health version); the updater UI is hidden outside Tauri. Also corrected the version-check command in the Docker docs (omnivoice, not omnivoice-studio). (#249)
• Transcription failures were masked by a generic "Transcribe stream dropped" message. The transcribe SSE stream now surfaces the real, sanitized cause (with an actionable hint) instead of silently dropping when model load or VRAM offload fails. (#255)

[0.3.0] — Unreleased

Added

• Frameless dictation widget. Global dictation upgraded from an in-app FAB to a true OS-level floating widget that hovers over any application. Transparent, decorations-free, always-on-top secondary Tauri window activated by ⌘+⇧+Space. Auto-hides 2.5 s after a successful paste.
• Standalone CaptureWidget component. Refactored CaptureButton into CaptureWidget, running on an isolated route (/?window=widget).
• Social preview image. Added social-preview.png for GitHub SEO.

Changed

• README overhaul. Compact 3-column feature grid, reorganized Quickstart (one-command install, Docker, Desktop App tips), updated comparison table, roadmap, and footer CTA.
• Docker Compose profiles are mutually exclusive. CPU service now requires --profile cpu (was the implicit default). Prevents port 3900 conflict when running --profile gpu. Usage: docker compose --profile cpu up or docker compose --profile gpu up.

Fixed

• Docker GPU detection false negative. Preflight reported "No compatible GPU detected" inside Docker containers because nvidia-smi isn't present in the PyTorch base image. The GPU probe now falls back to torch.cuda.is_available() and torch.cuda.get_device_name(), correctly showing CUDA as available in containerized deployments.

---

[0.2.6] — Unreleased

License

• Relicensed Studio under Functional Source License (FSL-1.1-ALv2). Free for personal, educational, internal-team, and non-commercial use. Each release converts automatically to Apache License, Version 2.0 on the second anniversary of its publication.
• The bundled omnivoice/ Python TTS model package remains separately licensed under Apache 2.0 by its upstream authors — not relicensed here.
• In-app Commercial License page no longer publishes pricing tiers. Pricing is being finalized; the page now invites quote requests and links the FSL terms.

Added

• Single-instance enforcement. Launching a second copy now focuses the existing window instead of starting a second backend that races for port 3900. Powered by tauri-plugin-single-instance.
• Close-to-tray. Clicking the window X (or Cmd+W on macOS) now hides the window and keeps the backend + tray menu alive. The tray "Quit" item is the only path that fully exits and shuts down the Python backend (cleanup moved to RunEvent::ExitRequested).
• Recording-state tray icon. Tray icon flips to a red-dot variant while a dictation recording is active and reverts when it stops or errors out.
• Customizable global dictation hotkey. New Settings → Capture tab. Record any modifier-plus-key combo, save it, and it's persisted in config.json and re-registered on every launch. Failed registrations (combo already taken by the OS) roll back to the previously-working binding instead of leaving the user with no shortcut.
• WebSocket-final dictation path. Capture now treats the streaming final message as the source of truth and skips the duplicate HTTP POST /transcribe that used to run on every dictation. Audio is transcribed once instead of twice — typical dictation latency roughly halved. New EOF text-frame protocol (server also accepts an empty binary frame as EOF). HTTP POST kept as fallback for WS error / timeout / WS-never-opened.
• Chunk queueing during WS handshake. The first 250 ms of audio is no longer dropped from the server's final transcript. MediaRecorder chunks captured while the WebSocket is still in CONNECTING state are queued and drained in ws.onopen.

Changed

• Docker default bind is loopback. docker-compose.yml now publishes 127.0.0.1:3900:3900 instead of 3900:3900 — the API is no longer reachable from the LAN out of the box. To expose it deliberately, change the mapping to 0.0.0.0:3900:3900. README documents the trade-off and recommends a reverse proxy with auth (Caddy basic_auth, nginx + htpasswd, Tailscale) for any non-loopback exposure.
• Donate page trimmed. Removed Patreon and the Bitcoin / Ethereum / Solana cryptocurrency cards. Removed the bundled qrcode.react dependency. The "Commercial License" CTA moves from the bottom of the page to the top-right of the page header.
• WS dictation hostname now derived from the configured API_BASE instead of a hardcoded localhost:3900, so deployments behind reverse proxies route correctly.
• HTTP POST fallback timeout scales with recording length (max(15s, recordedMs + 10s)) so long-form dictations don't trip the fallback and run the model twice.

Fixed

• Backend was killed on every window close even if the user only intended to dismiss the window. Backend shutdown now fires only on real-quit (RunEvent::ExitRequested), not on the close-to-hide path.
• Hotkey rollback. set_dictation_shortcut previously left the user with no global shortcut if register(new) failed after unregister(old) succeeded. The previous binding is now restored on failure.
• WebSocket dictation pipeline lost the first audio chunk. MediaRecorder was started before the WebSocket finished its handshake, so the first 250 ms chunk — which carries the WebM EBML header — was dropped from the WS stream. Every subsequent server-side ffmpeg conversion then failed with exit status 183 ("Invalid data found when processing input"), partials never appeared, and the HTTP fallback only fired after the full timeout. The WebSocket is now constructed before the recorder, every chunk is queued through wsPendingRef until ws.onopen drains it, and a server error message (or unexpected onclose after the recorder has stopped) fires the HTTP fallback immediately instead of waiting out the timeout.
• Microphone access prompt on macOS. Added an Info.plist with NSMicrophoneUsageDescription (and NSCameraUsageDescription for forward-compat) so getUserMedia no longer fails silently on macOS 10.14+ TCC. Tauri's bundler auto-merges the file at bundle time. Mic-denial toasts now also include platform-specific recovery hints (Settings paths for macOS/Windows, audio-group check for Linux).

Infrastructure

• uv bundled per-platform. Release installers now ship the uv binary as a Tauri sidecar (bundle.externalBin). First launch no longer requires network access for the uv-download step — bootstrap uses the bundled binary directly. Adds ~12-15 MB per platform installer; falls back to PATH lookup, then standalone download, when the bundled file isn't present (dev builds, future targets). Pinned at UV_VERSION = "0.11.7"; bump the constant in lib.rs and the matching env var in release.yml together to refresh.
• ffmpeg fetch removed from Tauri bootstrap. The redundant download from eugeneware/ffmpeg-static (saved to app_data/bin/) was never used by the backend, which already resolves ffmpeg via imageio_ffmpeg.get_ffmpeg_exe() from the pip wheel pulled by uv sync. Net effect: one fewer first-run network round-trip, one fewer splash-screen stage, and the splash no longer shows the misleading "Downloading ffmpeg…" line.
• CI cross-platform check. PRs now run cargo check against the Tauri shell on macOS (Apple Silicon), Windows, and Linux in parallel — surfaces platform-specific Rust regressions before tag push without paying the full ~15 min/platform tauri-bundle cost (full bundling stays in release.yml on tag push).
• Release notes from CHANGELOG. release.yml now extracts the matching ## [X.Y.Z] section from CHANGELOG.md and uses it as the GitHub Release body, replacing the prior placeholder "Auto-generated release. See commit log for changes."
• Tests: tests/test_capture_ws.py (3 cases) covers the EOF text-frame, empty-binary-frame, and legacy disconnect-finalize paths for /ws/transcribe.

Internal

• New Tauri commands: quit_app, set_tray_recording, get_dictation_shortcut, set_dictation_shortcut.
• New Tauri state: AppFlags { quitting }, TrayHandle { tray }, DictationShortcutState { current }.
• New deps: tauri-plugin-single-instance 2.x, tauri/image-png feature flag (enables Image::from_bytes for in-memory tray-icon swap).

---

[0.2.5] — 2026-04-29

Region selector, realtime download speed, retry buttons, recheck top-right, HF mirror support, splash bootstrap-log backfill. See git log v0.2.4..v0.2.5 for the full set.

Earlier releases

See GitHub Releases for prior versions.