FlowAir v2.2.0

FlowAir v2.2.0 focuses on what an operator actually lives with: never going black on air, telling you at a glance what is happening, and keeping the machine cool enough for a small PC to run it around the clock.

Playback

• Fixed: black screen after CUE. Pressing PLAY right after CUE could leave the output black until you pressed STOP and PLAY again. The player now waits until the file is really ready, retries on its own, recovers from a stalled load, and reports a genuine failure to the engine instead of staying dark.
• Unplayable files never reach air. HEVC, 4:2:2 and 10-bit H.264, MPEG-2, VC-1, DivX/Xvid, ProRes and containers such as AVI, WMV, FLV and MPEG are detected when the file is added, flagged red in the playlist, and skipped during playback. Files that play without audible audio (AC-3, E-AC-3, DTS) are flagged amber.
• Damaged files fail clearly. A truncated or unreadable file reports the real reason instead of a generic error, and a file replaced on disk is analysed again automatically.
• Timing is untouched. The scheduling core is byte-identical; 4s/5s/6s clips still transition at 3.76s and 8.75s.

Playlist

• Duplicates work everywhere. Adding a file that is already in the playlist adds a copy, Ctrl+drag copies an existing row, and duplicating is instant because the file is not analysed twice.
• Multi-level undo. Up to 50 steps. Deleting the entire playlist and pressing Ctrl+Z brings it back in order, with notes, OBS events, STOP rows and loop flags.
• Keyboard. Shift+arrows extends the selection, Ctrl+arrows moves the selected rows, Ctrl+F filters the view without ever hiding what is on air, Ctrl+A selects all.
• Double-click a location to open that file's folder in Explorer.

Interface

• Green is the row on air in every state, including cued and stopped. Amber appears only when the engine is really about to take the next item. Red means the file will not play.
• Denser rows, one aligned grid, and STOP, NOTE and OBS rows with their own colour and icon.
• The countdown turns amber at ten seconds and red at five.
• A new icon set replaces the emoji, and the ON AIR indicator no longer shifts the header.
• Confirmations are keyboard-driven: Enter confirms, Escape cancels, and the safe button holds the focus.

Settings

• Custom shortcuts. Reassign play, stop, next, cue, delete, undo, copy, paste, find, select all, exit and the fullscreen output toggle. Conflicts are refused, system combinations are protected, and everything can be reset to the defaults. Your bindings persist.
• Audio output device. Send the program audio to a specific Windows device, so the operator keeps the PC audio on their own speakers while the broadcast goes out through HDMI.
• Every setting now confirms that it was really applied.

Updates

FlowAir checks for new versions quietly and can download and install them for you. With no internet it fails silently and never delays startup, it never shows a popup, it remembers a version you dismissed, it warns before installing while something is on air, and the whole check can be turned off.

Installer

• Installing over an existing copy keeps your settings and no longer risks interrupting a running broadcast.
• The Windows entry carries the right version, publisher and icon; .flowair files open with FlowAir; uninstalling removes the firewall rule and the application data.

Under the hood

Validation runs one analysis per file instead of three, the interface stops redrawing the whole playlist every second, player windows no longer receive the full playlist on every tick, and the engine no longer pauses its own timing thread for garbage collection. Measured over three minutes of continuous playout with 80 items: 0.7% of one CPU core, stable memory and no thread growth.

---

Install: download FlowAir-Setup.exe and run it. The installer is not code-signed, so Windows will show "Windows protected your PC" — choose More info → Run anyway. Installing over version 2.1.0 keeps your configuration; no need to uninstall first.