WaveFlow QuickPlay v1.3.0

WaveFlow QuickPlay 1.3.0

A large selection sent from the file manager now lands in one window, Explorer hands it over in one go, and the bitrate display now follows what is actually playing.

New

• Live bitrate: the format chip showed the whole file's average, read from its tags, from the first second to the last. A FLAC that opens on a quiet passage showed a low figure through its loud middle. QuickPlay now measures the bitrate each second from the packets it decodes and shows it as that second plays; the average shows only until the first reading. In silence it drops to a few kbps, as the compressed stream really does.
• DSD bitrate: DSF and DFF files showed none. Their rate is constant, one bit per sample and channel, so the chip shows it from the header: 5 645 kbps for DSD64 stereo.
• Explorer hands the whole selection to one QuickPlay: Play with QuickPlay and Add to QuickPlay playlist started one QuickPlay per selected file, a thousand processes for a thousand files. They are now drop targets: Explorer starts QuickPlay once and gives it the whole selection. Folders lose the 15-item limit Explorer put on them. Installing 1.3.0, by hand or by the updater, switches the menu entries over.

Fixed

• A large selection no longer opens dozens of windows. Launches that arrived faster than the player could take them, or before its window was up, each opened their own window, and enough of them could bring the system down. A launch that finds the player busy now waits for it to take its files, for up to 30 seconds, and opens no window of its own. This covers Linux file managers and Explorer's Open with, which still start one process per file.
• A launch tried twice is queued once. A launch that timed out and tried again could add its files twice.
• Single instance with a long temporary directory. On macOS and Linux, a $TMPDIR or $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR set by hand, or a long user name, could make the socket's path too long; every launch then opened its own window. QuickPlay now falls back to a shorter one: a short name in the same directory, else a directory of yours in /tmp that only you can open.
• A restart that lost its state says so. When pinning or unpinning under Wayland restarts QuickPlay and the new copy cannot read where the old one was, it still opens, now with Playlist lost while restarting in the status line rather than an empty player and no word why.

Install

• Windows: download waveflow-quickplay_1.3.0_x64-setup.exe. It installs for the current user without administrator rights and registers the context-menu entries. Run it over an earlier version to upgrade; your settings live in their own file and are kept.
• Linux: the .deb for Debian and Ubuntu, the .rpm for Fedora, RHEL and openSUSE, or the .AppImage for any distribution (make it executable and run it). All three carry the desktop entry, so QuickPlay appears in "Open with" for audio files.
• macOS: download waveflow-quickplay_1.3.0_macos-universal.dmg, open it and drag WaveFlow QuickPlay to Applications. The app is signed ad hoc, not by an Apple Developer ID, so macOS blocks the first launch: open System Settings › Privacy & Security and choose Open Anyway (on macOS 14 and earlier, right-click the app and choose Open).

1.2.0 installed from the Windows installer, the macOS app or the AppImage updates itself to 1.3.0: it downloads it at launch and installs it when you close QuickPlay. 1.0.0 and 1.1.0 do not look for updates, so they are upgraded by hand once.

SHA-256 checksums are in SHA256SUMS-windows.txt, SHA256SUMS-linux.txt and SHA256SUMS-macos.txt. latest.json is what the updater reads: it lists the packages that update themselves (the Windows installer, the macOS app and the AppImage), each with its signature.

Note

The Windows installer is signed with WaveFlow's self-signed certificate, so Windows may still show a SmartScreen warning on first launch.

Known limitations

• One hand-over carries up to 10 000 files, in a message of at most 4 MiB (the paths with their line breaks and the command). A larger selection given to a QuickPlay that is already open opens in a window of its own instead.
• Pinned on Wayland, QuickPlay runs under XWayland, which can look softer at fractional scaling unless the compositor scales X11 windows natively. A session without XWayland cannot pin.
• A .deb, an .rpm and a copy run from a read-only place (the disk image itself, or an app macOS runs from a translocated copy because it was not moved to Applications) are never replaced by QuickPlay: they only say that a new version is out.
• On macOS, Finder has no per-app menu entries, so there is no Add to QuickPlay playlist there; Open With replaces the queue, as Play with does on Windows.
• Continue in WaveFlow needs WaveFlow Desktop 2.0.0-beta.1 or later, read from the install's metadata. The button stays hidden for an older WaveFlow, for one whose version cannot be read (such as an AppImage put on PATH by hand), and for the Flatpak build, whose sandbox cannot see the hand-over file.
• The output device is the system default, opened in shared mode.

Full changelog: v1.2.0...v1.3.0