RadioV2 1.1.0 — stability and performance

A stability and performance release. Nothing about how RadioV2 looks has changed; almost everything about how it behaves under the surface has.

Faster to start

The big one. Launching RadioV2 — especially the first launch after switching the computer on — could take a long time, and the window simply wasn't there while it happened. The cause was the audio engine initialising before the window was allowed to appear: 16.8 seconds on a cold start, all of it with nothing on screen.

That now happens on its own thread while the window comes up. Measured against 1.0.6 on the same machine:

	1.0.6	1.1.0
Window appears	3.3 s warm, 27.7 s cold	~2.0 s warm
Memory at idle	731 MB	283 MB
CPU after launch	9.5 s	4.6 s
Browsing stations	43–72 ms per page	under 1 ms
Download size	—	17 MB smaller

No more freezes

Stopping a stream was a blocking operation running on the same thread that draws the window, so a dead or stalled station could lock the whole app for seconds. It happened when pausing, when the network dropped, and — worst — when the machine went to sleep.

Every call into the audio engine now runs on a dedicated thread. The window stays responsive regardless of what the stream is doing.

Also fixed: a race that could crash the app outright when switching stations quickly, and a bug where resuming from sleep at the same moment the network came back could start two streams at once.

Now playing actually stays on screen

Track information arrives while a station is still connecting, and was being wiped the instant playback started. On stations that hold a track for several minutes you'd see nothing at all until the next song. Fixed.

When something goes wrong, you can now find out why

RadioV2 previously wrote two lines to its log per day and silently swallowed errors. It now records startup timings, every play and stop, and the audio engine's own warnings, with stream credentials stripped so a log is safe to share. Settings → Open Log Folder opens them.

A station that won't play also says so in the player bar instead of failing quietly.

Smaller and tidier

The station database was rebuilt — 79 MB down to 36 MB with no stations lost — and station artwork is now cached properly instead of being re-downloaded, with proper timeouts so dead artwork servers can't pile up connections.

Upgrading

Install over your existing version. Favourites, volume, theme and settings are preserved — verified on an upgrade from 1.0.6 with 18 favourites.

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Under the hood this release adds 76 automated tests to a project that had none.