Waves 1.5.0

Waves 1.5 is the largest update yet, focused on making per-app audio control feel dependable, understandable, and polished from first launch onward.

Highlights

• A premium guided setup explains local audio processing, walks through only the permissions and readiness steps your Mac needs, and offers an optional mixer tour that can be ended immediately.
• New route-health states make it clear when an app is visible, monitored, managed, yielded to another router, recovering, or needs attention.
• Wave Link coexistence is substantially safer. Waves verifies active Wave Link ownership, yields affected routes conservatively, and never wraps Wave Link's own mixed output.
• The mixer now has focused keyboard control, stronger VoiceOver semantics, accessible actions and announcements, Reduce Motion behavior, and clearer unavailable-state explanations.
• Settings are reorganized into focused panes for General, Mixer, Profiles, Sound, Shortcuts & Automation, Setup, and Diagnostics.
• Per-app routing, equalizer, boost, profiles, device memory, Adaptive Mix, automatic conferencing mute, and route recovery received broad lifecycle and persistence hardening.
• External control is available through an opt-in local protocol version 1 socket, the wavesctl command-line tool, and the separately versioned Stream Deck companion.

Reliability and security

• Process identity, Core Audio object ownership, route teardown, callback geometry, and device changes are revalidated before native audio work.
• Persistence uses bounded, no-follow reads with additive schema-1 upgrades, corruption preservation, and durable migration markers.
• The local control socket is same-user only, rate-limited before decoding, queue-bounded, and published through a verified inode lifecycle.
• Release packaging now uses exact archived source, isolated universal builds, pinned signing identity, notarization, private artifact staging, and guarded publication checks.

Compatibility

• macOS 14.2 or later.
• Universal app for Apple Silicon and Intel.
• No virtual audio driver, system extension, reboot, account, or telemetry.
• Audio is processed locally and is never recorded or transmitted.

Open the DMG and drag Waves to Applications. Existing profiles, levels, equalizers, and preferences migrate in place.

Validation boundary

The signed and notarized build passed the local package, hosted CI, updater-signature, rollback, Intel, and first-run checks described in the repository. Physical Wave Link and Stream Deck hardware coverage, a compatible-host Thread Sanitizer run, long-duration soaks, and the independent final security receipt remain follow-up validation. This release does not claim those specific surfaces as verified.