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@github-actions github-actions released this 30 Sep 05:10
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v1.8.0
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Learn about vigilant mode.

1.8.0 (2026-09-30)

✨ What's new in v1.8.0

WaveFlow 1.8.0 — every word, every detail. Lyrics now follow you everywhere, highlighted word by word and floating on your desktop; exclusive output now works across Windows, Linux and macOS; your playlists take their colours from their covers; and WaveFlow talks to the rest of your setup, from MPD clients to your own server.

Our biggest release yet: 119 issues closed, most of them reported by people who took the time to tell us what they hit. Still 100% local-first.

🎧 Your audio hardware, properly used

  • Exclusive output on all three systems — WASAPI on Windows, ALSA on Linux, CoreAudio on macOS. WaveFlow can take the sound card for itself, for ordinary playback as well as DSD.
  • DSD over PCM (DoP) sends the original DSD stream to a compatible DAC without converting it to PCM first. It ships switched off — turn it on under Settings → Playback and audio if you own the hardware.
  • The output device menu tells the truth: what each device actually accepts, and which one really opened rather than the one that was asked for. When playback has to drop out of exclusive mode, you are told.
  • ReplayGain, done properly — album gain, a pre-amp, a fallback level for untagged tracks, and clipping prevention, all adjustable.
  • Opus and AIFF are now supported.
  • WaveFlow remembers where you were: the resume point is saved on exit and as you listen.
The output device menu listing each device with the formats it actually accepts

🎤 Lyrics, everywhere you look

  • Floating desktop lyrics — a window that sits above everything else, so the words are there while you work. Resizable from any side, one line or two.
  • Karaoke that highlights word by word, and when a provider only gives line timings, WaveFlow estimates the timing of each word itself — so the karaoke runs on almost any synced lyrics.
  • Lyrics in the mini-player too, with the same word-by-word karaoke as the immersive view, the lyrics panel and the floating window.
  • Romanization puts a readable line under Japanese, Korean and Chinese lyrics, and translations sit alongside the original.
  • Backing vocals, duets and instrumental breaks — backing vocals sit under the line they belong to, the second voice of a duet answers from the other side, both lines stay lit while two voices overlap, and three dots breathe through the instrumental parts.
  • Held notes ripple through their letters in the immersive view, stronger the longer the note is held. You can switch it off.
  • Pick a lyrics plugin by hand from the lyrics source menu, and plugins now get the album, the track's length and its ISRC, so they find the right recording rather than a namesake.
  • A colour for the line being sung — one of eight pastels, or a rainbow that moves to the next colour with every line.
  • Calmer on the network: a track with no lyrics stops re-searching every time you open it, you can switch off any provider you don't want, and whole genres can be skipped.
The floating desktop lyrics window over a desktop, showing the current line

🎨 Your library, brought to life

  • Playlists take their colour from their cover — the header is built from the artwork, or you pick the colour yourself and it stays.
  • Canvas plays a short looping clip in place of the cover while a track is on, in a frame shaped for it.
  • The immersive view puts it all together: artwork, clip, and lyrics synced to the word.
  • Artist pages get a full-width backdrop you can choose.
  • The mini-player keeps up with all of it: Canvas clips, the cover slideshow, and a volume slider with mute.
  • A high-contrast mode that works across every theme and skin.
A playlist page whose header takes its colour from the album artwork above the track list
The immersive view: a track's Canvas clip looping beside lyrics synced word by word, with a romanization under each line

🔌 It talks to the rest of your setup

  • MPD server — drive playback from the MPD clients you already use. Off unless you turn it on.
  • Plugins — an in-app store with verified installs. Release Radar finds recent releases from the artists in your library, Apple Motion Artwork and TIDAL Artwork bring animated covers, BiniLyrics adds word-by-word lyrics with backing vocals and duets, and Web Radio carries 30 000+ stations.
  • A WaveFlow server, if you run one, now merges its catalogue into your library: browse both from one list, keep a track on disk, or import it.

▶️ Playback

  • Album shuffle shuffles whole records, and Mood radio and Daily Mix can build their sessions out of whole albums.
  • Mood radio ranks tracks by how well they fit the mood.
  • Playback buttons under the Windows taskbar thumbnail.
  • Playing a track from your history queues the ones after it too, and single-click play no longer restarts the track on a double-click.

📚 Library

  • Browse by folder, and find Chinese titles by their pinyin.
  • A "Needs attention" tab for tracks missing something.
  • Find artists that are really several names joined by commas, and split them.
  • Tag editing that is safe for your files, and now reaches DSD.
  • Star ratings reach your files reliably, ID3v2 included, and the tag editor suggests values as you type.
  • Smart playlists: ten new rule types, relative time windows, and a live count while you build.
  • Artist pages list every track the artist is credited on, features included, and an artist who only appears as an album artist ("Various Artists") gets a page too.
  • A rescan keeps each album with its album artist: a compilation, or an album with an explicit album artist, is no longer handed to whichever track was rescanned first.

🖥️ Interface

  • Settings reorganised, with a search box, and switches instead of tick boxes.
  • Back and forward remember where you were.
  • A native-looking window frame on Linux and macOS.
  • A cover slideshow behind the now-playing view.
  • A radio station fills the immersive view with its artwork.
  • A switch to hide animated covers altogether.
  • Put the mini-player back to its default size and corner from Settings, or by double-clicking its drag handle.
  • On from the start: the lyrics column in the immersive view, and the spectrum visualizer, now in rainbow. If you had set them yourself, your choice stays.

🛠️ Reliability

  • A launch that never paints anything falls back to software rendering on its own next time.
  • Switching profiles no longer inherits the previous profile's audio settings.
  • A setting you change reaches every window.
  • A plugin that cannot load says so instead of failing silently.
  • After an automatic crossfade, lyrics and the progress bar no longer run a few seconds behind the music.
  • An album's embedded cover follows its first track.
  • A motion cover you set by hand now shows during playback.
  • On Linux, animated covers now play, and the AppImage no longer rescans its video plugins at every launch.
  • On Linux, the immersive view no longer blacks out when an animated cover appears, and the output device you picked is found again at launch.
  • The exclusive-output switch shows what you chose, even when the device refused it.
  • A sound device that keeps failing no longer fills your disk with logs or keeps a CPU core busy: WaveFlow steps back and retries less and less often. Logs are kept seven days, 50 MB a day at most.
  • Your library is copied before every database upgrade, and the last three copies are kept.
  • On Windows, a minimised or hidden window gives memory back while the mini-player plays.
  • The AppImage opens folders and links again.
  • A profile backup imports even while the profile it came from still exists, under a free name — and export and import say they are running.

🌍 Languages

  • All 17 languages were reviewed line by line, five of them — Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean and German — by native speakers.
  • Several hundred strings changed: wording translated too literally, terms that did not match between screens, and a few sentences that said the opposite of the English.

⚠️ One removal: the Spotify integration

It is gone. It needed you to register a developer application before anything worked, it was unreliable, and very few people ever got that far.

  • If you had connected an account, the stored token is deleted when you update — there is nothing for you to do.
  • Daily Mix and On Repeat are WaveFlow's own and stay, and Canvas clips never depended on it.

📦 Recommended install

Use your platform's package manager when one is available, so updates keep flowing through the 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 below. The bundle isn't Apple-signed, so 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 below — .AppImage, .deb, .rpm, .exe, .msi, .dmg.

Thanks to everyone who tested betas and sent feedback — it shaped a lot of this release. 💚

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