v1.5.0

1.5.0 (2026-06-20)

✨ What's new in v1.5.0

WaveFlow 1.5.0 is the skins & extensibility release. The UI grew four extra skins on top of the Apple-Music baseline, a permission-gated plugin SDK landed with the first plugin (Web Radio) bundled in, and the lyrics waterfall now reaches five providers instead of one. Plenty of plumbing for the upcoming waveflow-server shipped under the hood too, but none of it changes the app's local-first model in 1.5.0.

🎨 Skins — four new visual identities

The theme system grew an orthogonal "skin" axis. 5 skins × 14 themes = 70 combinations, each persisted per profile. Studio stays as the default Apple-Music-inspired baseline; four new identities land alongside it:

• Editorial — broadsheet magazine layout, Playfair Display serifs, halftone artwork via mix-blend-luminosity, ornate WaveFlow Gazette masthead.
• Lounge — warm burgundy glass over a blurred cover backdrop, Apple-Vibrancy backdrop-filter recipe.
• Pulse — OLED neon-club aesthetic, dual magenta/cyan aurora, vinyl-spin cover that mirrors playback state.
• Liquid — full Apple Vibrancy with the 8-layer inset box-shadow glass recipe, theme-aware (works in light + dark).

Picker lives in Settings → Appearance alongside the existing theme picker. Onboarding got a "Pick a vibe" step so first-run users land on the right combo. Motion is dispatched per-skin via Framer Motion — Pulse uses a bouncy spring, calmer skins inherit the soft default. Typography is bundled (Playfair Display, Lora, Space Grotesk, Space Mono, DM Sans Variable) — zero Google Fonts request at runtime.

🧩 Plugin SDK — sandboxed WASI plugins (RFC-002)

The plugin layer landed as a sandboxed runtime with explicit permission gates:

• WIT + wasmtime — plugins ship as WASM components compiled against a waveflow-plugin-sdk interface (host imports for HTTP, storage, audio, UI).
• Permission gates — every host import is gated by a manifest declaration the user approves on install. No silent network access, no silent filesystem reach.
• Guardrails by default — 50 MB max plugin.wasm size, 5 s HTTP timeouts, response-body cap, no redirect following (SSRF guard), per-plugin mutex on install/enable/uninstall to close TOCTOU races, offline-mode short-circuit on every outbound request.
• Settings panel — installed plugins list with one-click enable/disable/uninstall, per-plugin permission chips (network / storage / assets), version + size.

📻 Web Radio — the first plugin

Ships bundled in the app (so you have something to try the SDK against): a Web Radio plugin that streams internet stations through the same cpal engine the rest of the app uses. Stations route through the audio decoder thread so EQ / ReplayGain / spectrum visualizer all work over live streams. Switching stations fast doesn't deadlock — in-flight requests are cancelled cleanly.

🎤 Lyrics — multi-provider waterfall + new save modes

The lyrics fetcher used to be LRCLIB-only. 1.5.0 ships a dedicated waveflow-syncedlyrics crate with five providers chained as a graceful fallback:

1. Musixmatch (enhanced word-level only) — opt-in, gated on MUSIXMATCH_ENABLED env.
2. LRCLIB — exact metadata match, primary line-level source.
3. NetEase — large Asian catalogue, native LRC.
4. Megalobiz — community-scraped enrichment.
5. Genius — plain-text last resort.

Each provider error is non-fatal: the chain degrades to a clean miss + cache-empty so the panel never shows a raw HTTP error. Sidecar .lrc/.txt discovery runs before the network, so locally-bundled lyrics never pay a network round-trip.

On the editor side:

• App-wide save destination — write back to the audio tag, to a sidecar file, or to the DB only. Three radio buttons in Settings → Library.
• Export to standalone .lrc / .txt — Tauri save dialog, file written exactly where you point it, audio file left untouched.
• Musixmatch translation language — pick a target language in Settings; each line comes back with its (translation) companion.
• Word-mode auto-advance — capturing the last word of a line bumps the cursor to the next line automatically, no more reaching for the keyboard between lines.
• Opt-in centering for synced lyrics in fullscreen — toggle in Appearance.

🪟 Sidebar hide/show toggle (#167)

A single button in the topbar collapses the sidebar to a thin rail or hides it entirely — useful on 13" / cramped 1080p screens where the right panels (Now Playing / Queue / Lyrics) deserve the room. The hidden sidebar is marked inert so it can't trap Tab focus or steal pointer events.

🧱 Under the hood — waveflow-server plumbing (not user-facing yet)

Under the hood, a lot of groundwork landed for the future waveflow-server companion: tenant-scoped Postgres repositories in waveflow-core, auth + sync plumbing, public playlist share canonical IDs, and per-track snapshots in playlist sync ops. None of this is exposed as a user-facing feature in 1.5.0 — the desktop app remains fully local-first today, and the sync stack will surface in a later release once the server companion is ready.

🩹 Quality pass

• Locales — 579 fixes across 16 locales over four validator passes, followed by a manual review pass across the non-source languages. Brand tokens (WaveFlow, Daily Mix, On Repeat, Last.fm, Deezer, ReplayGain, LRCLIB, BPM) stay verbatim across every language per the new convention. CJK punctuation normalized (full-width （）：？！ between CJK chars, half-width for Latin content). Russian plural forms, French _zero slots, German typographic quotes — all aligned.
• Audio robustness — Web Radio session survives a DeviceNotAvailable rebuild (output device unplugged + replugged mid-stream). Decoder reports the current track id on error during a crossfade so the analytics layer credits the right row.
• Settings → language dropdown — portaled to escape the backdrop-filter stacking trap on Lounge / Liquid Glass (was painting behind the cards below it). Focus-restoration on Escape + option pick + Tab matches WAI-ARIA combobox APG.
• Plugin SDK security hardening — 16+ rounds of CodeRabbit review across 5 phases. Highlights: TOCTOU mutex on install/uninstall, full-column upsert on app_setting to satisfy NOT NULL constraints, take() bounded read on plugin.wasm, redirect following disabled to close SSRF, response body cap, race-free state writes, offline-mode short-circuit on every host import.
• Lyrics raw-error leak — fetch errors no longer paint themselves as lyrics content in the panel; collapsed into a localized "Couldn't reach lyrics providers" empty state with retry hint.

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📦 Recommended install

Use the package manager that fits your platform when one is available, so updates keep flowing through the same tool you already use.

Windows

winget install InstaZDLL.WaveFlow

Arch / Manjaro / EndeavourOS / CachyOS

yay -S waveflow-bin
# or: paru -S waveflow-bin

Fedora / RHEL / Rocky / Alma / CentOS Stream

sudo dnf copr enable instazdll/waveflow
sudo dnf install waveflow

Debian / Ubuntu / Mint / Pop!_OS

The Debian package is wave-flow (kebab-case, required by the Debian naming spec — Tauri bundles it that way from the WaveFlow product name).

sudo install -d -m 0755 /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://packages.buildkite.com/instazdll/waveflow/gpgkey \
  | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/waveflow.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/waveflow.gpg] https://packages.buildkite.com/instazdll/waveflow/any/ any main" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/waveflow.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install wave-flow

macOS

No Homebrew cask yet — grab the .dmg from the assets below. The bundle is not Apple-Developer-signed; right-click → Open the first time, or run xattr -cr /Applications/WaveFlow.app to clear the quarantine flag.

Standalone download

Everything is also available as a raw bundle in the assets below — .AppImage, .deb, .rpm, .exe, .msi, .dmg for users who'd rather skip the repo.