Quill Radio 1.1.0

What's new in 1.1.0

• A new heart: the mpv playback engine. Quill Radio 1.1.0 ships a second audio engine -- mpv, the same engine trusted by media players everywhere -- and uses it automatically. You don't have to know or care, but it's the reason almost everything else on this list exists. The classic Windows Media engine is still right there: Preferences (Ctrl+,) > Playback engine > "Windows Media (classic)" is exactly the pre-1.1 behavior, byte for byte. Best of both: whichever engine is playing, a station it can't open is quietly retried once on the other before you ever hear an error.
• Every stream format, finally. This is the consequence you'll feel immediately: Quill Radio now plays effectively every station format in real-world use -- MP3, AAC and HE-AAC (AAC+), Ogg Vorbis, Opus, FLAC streams, and HLS (m3u8). Ogg Vorbis, Opus, and HLS were simply undecodable before (Windows Media cannot play them), and they're everywhere among community, independent, and international stations: a whole class of "found it in the directory but it won't play" stations just started working. Raw recording keeps pace -- each format is captured to its natural file type (.ogg, .opus, .aac, and so on).
• Send the radio to a second sound card. The classic radio setup, finally: Preferences (Ctrl+,) gained Radio output device. Route the radio to a USB headset or a second sound card and keep your screen reader, and Quill Radio's own sounds, on the main one. Unplug that USB card and your choice is remembered, not silently reset; if the device can't be used the radio plays through the default and says so.
• Pause live radio. Rewind it. Quill Radio now keeps a rolling buffer of the live stream -- roughly 45 minutes at typical bitrates. Pause for the doorbell and resume where you left off. Missed a sentence? Rewind 30 Seconds (Ctrl+Shift+Left). Catch back up with Forward 30 Seconds (Ctrl+Shift+Right) or jump straight to Back to Live (Ctrl+Shift+L). Every move tells you how far behind live you are.
• Volume Boost. Some stations just broadcast quiet. Ctrl+Shift+B amplifies up to 50% past full volume -- and your normal volume scale, per-station volume memories, and mute all behave exactly as before.
• Sound, shaped your way -- instantly. Sound Enhancements grew from an EQ-and-compressor into a proper listening toolkit. New: Combine channels into mono -- with single-sided hearing or one earbud, a station that hard-pans a voice to the other channel simply loses it; mono blends both channels so nothing disappears. New: Night mode -- real-time loudness evening that lifts quiet passages, the natural partner to Even Out Volume taming loud ones; late-night listening without riding the volume keys. Two new quick presets, Small Speakers and Late Night, join the family, the three-band EQ and per-station memories are untouched -- and on the mpv engine, every change now applies live, mid-song, with no reconnect at all. Recordings with "Apply Sound Enhancements" capture the new options too.
• What's Playing, on more stations. When a station refuses the usual title request -- or streams over HLS, which has no title channel at all -- Quill Radio now reads the track title straight out of the playback engine, so Ctrl+T has an answer far more often.
• "Buffering..." instead of silence. When the network hiccups mid-song, Quill Radio now says what's happening while the engine rides it out.
• Alt+F4, your way. For some of us Alt+F4 is muscle memory -- and half the time you didn't mean to kill the radio, just get it out of the way. A new Preferences checkbox, Alt+F4 minimizes to the system tray (off by default), does exactly that: the window tucks away, the music keeps playing, and the tray icon has everything. The titlebar X and Station > Exit still follow your "When closing the window" choice, so a deliberate exit is still one keystroke away.
• Record the raw stream, exactly as sent. Recording Settings' Format list gained Raw stream -- exactly as sent, no re-encoding (lossless) next to MP3, OGG, FLAC, and WAV. Those four decode the incoming audio and re-encode it to the format you picked; the raw option does neither -- it copies the station's own audio packets straight to disk, so the file that lands is bit-for-bit what the server broadcast. It's the cleanest possible starting point if you want to do your own editing or convert it yourself, with nothing lost to a second pass through an encoder. Quill Radio names the file from the stream's own format for you -- an MP3 stream becomes a .mp3, AAC a .aac, Ogg Vorbis a .ogg, Opus a .opus, FLAC a .flac; anything out of the ordinary is tucked into a Matroska .mka file, which holds any audio losslessly and opens in players like VLC. Bitrate and Sound Enhancements don't touch a raw recording -- there's nothing being re-encoded for them to shape -- so they're quietly skipped, and if a recording rides out a dropped connection into a "(part 2)" file, that part keeps the same file type. Straight from a listener request: a recording mode that saves the raw stream as captured, as losslessly as possible.
• Stations that used to fail now heal themselves. Here's the one that started it: Magic 104.1 (KMGL) in Oklahoma City turns up in the directory, you press play, and... nothing. The real stream lives behind a JavaScript player on the station's site, so the listed address is a dead end, and the only way through was to open the website, find the "Listen Live" link, follow it, and dig the actual stream out of the player by hand. Quill Radio now does that digging for you. When a stream won't play it works down a ladder: re-resolve the address if it's a StreamTheWorld player that just moved servers, refresh the address from the directory, and -- if you leave it on -- scan the station's own website, following its "Listen Live"/"Play"/"Tune In" link into the player page and reading a Triton player straight off it. Find one clear stream and it just plays it (and remembers it for that favorite); find several and it tells you and sends you to Find Streams to pick. The website step is one checkbox in Preferences (on by default, off in Safe Mode); the quick re-resolves always run. It tries once per station per session, so a truly dead station never spins. A dead station is no longer a dead end.
• What's Playing, the way you'd actually say it. Some stations don't send a clean "Artist - Title" -- their broadcast systems cram a pile of catalog codes into the track name, and What's Playing (Ctrl+T) read the whole thing aloud: title="YOUR SONG",artist="Elton John",url="song_spot="F" MediaBaseId="0".... Now Quill Radio finds the title and the artist in that noise and just says "Now playing: YOUR SONG by Elton John." Better still, you decide the wording: Preferences (Ctrl+,) has a "What's Playing announcement" box where you write a short template with {title} and {artist} -- wrap optional words in [square brackets] so they disappear when there's nothing to fill them (the default {title}[ by {artist}] quietly drops the " by" when a stream sends no artist). Prefer "Elton John: YOUR SONG"? Type {artist}: {title}. Want the raw feed for a station you're curious about? {raw} gives you everything. Blank restores the default.
• The whole dial, not just the first 50. Browse Stations used to stop at 50 results -- so a search for "news," with hundreds of stations out there, looked like it only had 50 in the world. Now you get up to 200 at once, most-listened first, and when there are still more a More Stations button loads the next page and drops your cursor right on the first new arrival. The summary even tells you when there's more to reach for, and nudges you to add a tag or country when you'd rather narrow than page. Under the hood this pages the RadioBrowser directory properly, so the long tail is finally within reach.
• Volume keys, fixed again -- this time in Browse Stations. Search for a station, press Enter to play it, then reach for Ctrl+Down to bring the volume down... and nothing happened. Browse Stations is its own window, so the Playback menu's volume shortcut never reached it, and the station results list had already claimed the plain arrow keys for moving between rows. Now Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down work from anywhere in that window -- the results list, the volume slider, a button -- turning the same radio volume you'd change anywhere else, sliding the window's own volume control to match, and speaking the new level. Plain arrow keys still move you between stations, untouched. (Version 1.0.2 fixed exactly this on the main window's Favorites list; this reaches the Browse Stations window that fix didn't.)
• Find Streams now reaches the stations that hid behind a Play button. A whole class of broadcast stations -- thousands of them, and the entire player.listenlive.co network -- put their "Listen Live" on a modern JavaScript player (Triton Digital / StreamTheWorld). Those players build the stream address in code the moment you press Play, so it is written nowhere on the page for a scanner to read. Point the old Find Streams at one and it came back empty, even with a Play button sitting right there on the screen. No longer: Quill Radio now recognizes the player, reads the station's call letters straight off the page, and looks up the real, playable stream through the station provider's own public address service -- no embedded browser, no guessing at URLs. When a station offers both an MP3 and an AAC feed, you get both to choose from. It only ever does this for pages that really are these players and only for call letters the service confirms, so it never hands you a wrong stream; ordinary pages behave exactly as before, and the lookup happens as part of the same Scan you already press (and stays off in Safe Mode). One real report -- player.listenlive.co/34461, "Magic 104.1" -- turned into a fix that quietly covers thousands of stations at once.