Kipowi 0.4.0

A player and exporter for video, audio and images, by Jesper GB Henriksen.

Open a file, play it, set an in and out point, crop the picture, and for audio files change the level over parts of the waveform. Then write a new file containing exactly that. One clip at a time: no timeline, no layers, no project file.

New in 0.4.0 — the image editor

Open a single image and edit it in place. Crop it, adjust brightness and contrast, hold Original to compare, and undo or Reset to get back.

Remove Background runs locally, through Apple Vision. Nothing is uploaded and there is no model to install. Transparent areas show on a checkerboard, and a cutout exports as a transparent PNG. Restore Background puts it back.

• Export always writes a copy. Saving over the original is refused, and an existing output is only replaced once the new file is written
• Adjusted images come out 8-bit SDR
• Undo covers brightness and contrast, background changes and Reset. Crop drags do not get their own undo entries yet
• Original is a preview comparison; it does not change what gets exported
• Background removal depends on the image and on system support. If it is unavailable or finds no subject, every other control still works

Tested on Apple Silicon with networking denied: background removal finished on a 1920×1080 frame in 0.54 seconds and produced an alpha-bearing PNG. That is one sample, not a guarantee. Clean-machine first run and native Intel background removal are not yet verified.

Also in this release

• MKV plays directly, no converting the whole movie first. Export a selection or the whole file to MP4 or MOV. Pick the audio track under Playback → Audio Track; the export uses that choice. No VLC, FFmpeg, Homebrew or codec pack to install
• GIF export with size and frame rate, silent and looping, and a warning past 45 seconds
• Timeline zoom by pinch or + and −. Fit restores the whole movie, and the overview strip pans without moving your trim or the playhead
• MP3 export alongside WAV, AIFF and M4A

Known limits

MKV subtitles, LUT preview, frame grabs, image-sequence export and audio-only export are not supported. HDR, rotated and anamorphic MKV video exports are rejected. HDR GIF export is unavailable. Seeking a paused MKV may leave the picture unchanged until playback starts — playing and pausing first usually helps.

Install

Quit any running copy of Kipowi, open the disk image and drag Kipowi to Applications. If you are replacing an older version, keep a copy of the old app first.

Requires: macOS 14 or later. Universal for Apple silicon and Intel. Signed with a Developer ID certificate, notarised by Apple and stapled, so it opens without a Gatekeeper warning even offline. 68.4 MB to download, 140.5 MB installed.

83 automated tests passed with no failures.

Source code

Kipowi-0.4.0-Sources.tar.xz below is the matching source archive for the open-source media components the app bundles — VLC, VLCKit, FFmpeg and LAME — with the patches, dependency sources and build recipes. You do not need it to run Kipowi. It is here because the licences of those components require the corresponding source to be available beside the binary. All 49 upstream archives inside it were verified during packaging. Third-party notices are in the app under Kipowi › Media Component Licenses.

Checksums

b118dc425f13afe77e83cced30a7734efd7011aa97fcd861d6c5737883dc6ae3  Kipowi-0.4.0.dmg
cac9ea60e229d253e53d0e81bdf92ebe7078bf577e49983522327ce31aec1c94  Kipowi-0.4.0-Sources.tar.xz

Project page: https://jesperh.cv/apps/kipowi.html

Kipowi 0.3.0

A player and exporter for video and audio, by Jesper GB Henriksen.

Open a file, play it, set an in and out point, crop the picture, and for audio files change the level over parts of the waveform. Then write a new file containing exactly that. One clip at a time: no timeline, no layers, no project file.

New in 0.3.0

MKV plays directly. No converting the whole movie first — it opens and plays, and conversion happens only when you export. Export a selection or the whole file to MP4 or MOV, with H.264, HEVC or the supported ProRes options. No separate VLC, FFmpeg, Homebrew or codec installation is needed; the decoder ships inside the app.

GIF export. Size and frame-rate settings, silent, looping, and a warning before exporting a selection longer than 45 seconds.

Timeline zoom. Pinch, or use + and −. Fit restores the whole movie. The overview below the timeline lets you pan around a long file without moving your trim or your playback position.

MP3 export sits alongside WAV, AIFF and M4A for audio files.

Not supported for MKV in this version

Subtitles, LUT preview, frame grabs, image-sequence export and audio-only export. HDR, rotated and anamorphic MKV video exports are rejected. HDR GIF export is unavailable.

Opens

• Video: H.264, HEVC and ProRes in MOV, MP4 and M4V, plus MKV
• Audio: WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3, M4A, AAC, ALAC
• Blackmagic RAW, decoded through Blackmagic's SDK, with sound and metadata
• Image sequences: PNG, TIFF, TGA, EXR, JPEG, WebP, HEIC, SGI, BMP. Open one frame and it finds the rest
• Single images, as pictures

Exports

• Movies: MOV or MP4, H.264, HEVC or ProRes, full or half scale
• GIF, with size and frame rate
• Audio: WAV, AIFF, M4A, MP3
• Frame stacks: PNG, TIFF (none, LZW or ZIP), TGA
• Single pictures: PNG, TIFF or TGA
• Frame grabs as stills

Install

Quit any running copy of Kipowi, open the disk image and drag Kipowi to Applications. If you are replacing an older version, keep a copy of the old app first.

Requires: macOS 14 or later. Universal for Apple silicon and Intel. Signed with a Developer ID certificate, notarised by Apple and stapled, so it opens without a Gatekeeper warning even offline.

Source code

Kipowi-0.3.0-Sources.tar.xz below is the matching source archive for the open-source media components the app bundles — VLC, VLCKit, FFmpeg and LAME — with the patches, dependency sources and build recipes. You do not need it to run Kipowi. It is here because the licences of those components require the corresponding source to be available beside the binary. Third-party notices are in the app under Kipowi › Media Component Licenses.

Checksums

b7e644a97fba4399b582287322f6c7c5f684cc80a4418035613a7d47e51573dc  Kipowi-0.3.0.dmg
deb0420b6eb232c60ed247aa6f73c65fa0c498dcff4bd5cc9518bb4981444839  Kipowi-0.3.0-Sources.tar.xz

Project page: https://jesperh.cv/apps/kipowi.html

Kipowi 0.2.0

A player and exporter for video and audio, by Jesper GB Henriksen.

Open a file, play it, set an in and out point, crop the picture, and for audio files change the level over parts of the waveform. Then write a new file containing exactly that. One clip at a time: no timeline, no layers, no project file.

New in 0.2.0

A single image opens as a picture. Before, one image was treated as a one-frame sequence: it asked to be imported, then became a five second clip with a frame rate and a pair of trim handles. Now it just opens. The timeline goes away, so do the transport, trim and level controls, and what is left is the picture, its shape, crop and export.

• Photographs open the right way up. The rotation in a camera's EXIF tag is applied rather than ignored
• Export offers PNG, TIFF or TGA, at full or half scale, cropped or not
• Writing the same format back with no crop and no scale copies the file byte for byte, and the panel says so and gives the exact size rather than an estimate
• Full scale means the pixels as they are, including odd dimensions. Rounding to even is a video encoder's requirement and does not apply to a picture

A run of two or more numbered frames still opens as a sequence and still asks for a frame rate. That dialog also no longer overflows when the file name is long.

Opens

• Video: H.264, HEVC and ProRes in MOV, MP4 and M4V
• Audio: WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3, M4A, AAC, ALAC
• Blackmagic RAW, decoded through Blackmagic's SDK, with sound and metadata
• Image sequences: PNG, TIFF, TGA, EXR, JPEG, WebP, HEIC, SGI, BMP. Open one frame and it finds the rest
• Single images, as pictures

Exports

• Movies: MOV or MP4, H.264, HEVC or ProRes, full or half scale
• Audio: WAV, AIFF, M4A, MP3
• Frame stacks: PNG, TIFF (none, LZW or ZIP), TGA
• Single pictures: PNG, TIFF or TGA
• Frame grabs as stills

The export panel states the range, frame rate, output size and estimated file size before it runs, and hides controls that mean nothing for the file in front of it.

Trimming a frame stack to the same format copies the frames byte for byte rather than re-encoding them. The panel says which it will do before you commit.

Install

Open the disk image and drag Kipowi to Applications.

Requires: macOS 14 or later. Universal for Apple silicon and Intel. Signed with a Developer ID certificate, notarised by Apple and stapled, so it opens without a Gatekeeper warning even offline.

Known limits at 0.2.0

• LUTs are preview only. A graded view still exports ungraded
• Nothing is remembered between launches: LUT choice, decode scale and display aspect all reset
• A picture can be written as PNG, TIFF or TGA. JPEG and HEIF are not offered
• DPX and Cineon are not supported. FLAC is import only
• HDR passes through untouched, with no tone mapping
• Full 6K RAW playback tops out near 24 fps. Lower the decode quality for smooth scrubbing

Project page: https://jesperh.cv/apps/kipowi.html

Kipowi 0.1.0

A player and exporter for video and audio, by Jesper GB Henriksen.

Open a file, play it, set an in and out point, crop the picture, and for audio files change the level over parts of the waveform. Then write a new file containing exactly that. One clip at a time: no timeline, no layers, no project file.

Opens

• Video: H.264, HEVC and ProRes in MOV, MP4 and M4V
• Audio: WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3, M4A, AAC, ALAC
• Blackmagic RAW, decoded through Blackmagic's SDK, with sound and metadata
• Image sequences: PNG, TIFF, TGA, EXR, JPEG, WebP, HEIC, SGI, BMP. Open one frame and it finds the rest

Exports

• Movies: MOV or MP4, H.264, HEVC or ProRes, full or half scale
• Audio: WAV, AIFF, M4A, MP3
• Frame stacks: PNG, TIFF (none, LZW or ZIP), TGA
• Frame grabs as stills

The export panel states the range, frame rate, output size and estimated file size before it runs, and hides controls that mean nothing for the file in front of it.

Trimming a frame stack to the same format copies the frames byte for byte rather than re-encoding them. The panel says which it will do before you commit.

Install

Open the disk image and drag Kipowi to Applications.

Requires: macOS 14 or later. Universal for Apple silicon and Intel. Signed with a Developer ID certificate, notarised by Apple and stapled, so it opens without a Gatekeeper warning even offline.

Known limits at 0.1.0

• LUTs are preview only. A graded view still exports ungraded
• Nothing is remembered between launches: LUT choice, decode scale and display aspect all reset
• DPX and Cineon are not supported. FLAC is import only
• HDR passes through untouched, with no tone mapping
• Full 6K RAW playback tops out near 24 fps. Lower the decode quality for smooth scrubbing

Project page: https://jesperh.cv/apps/kipowi.html

FinderNotes 1.1

A scratchpad that appears when you press a key and disappears when you are done, by Jesper GB Henriksen.

Lives in the menu bar with no Dock icon. Notes are plain text on disk.

New in 1.1

It answers sums. End a line with = and the result appears after it in grey. Press tab to turn it into real text, or keep typing and it goes away.

• + - * / × ÷ ^, parentheses, a trailing %, and either . or , as the decimal separator
• Only pure arithmetic counts, so a reference number or a command in a note stays quiet. A bare number with no operator is not a sum
• The answer is drawn over the text rather than inserted into it. What is stored stays exactly what you typed, so a suggestion cannot be saved, copied, counted, or turn up on a card in the rail
• The parser is hand-written rather than NSExpression, which raises an Objective-C exception on malformed input that Swift cannot catch — evaluating every line as you type would otherwise be a crash generator. Checked against 200,000 fuzzed lines with no trap

Opening a note now puts the caret at the end rather than the start, which suits a scratchpad and makes a sum on the last line answerable straight away.

A drawn pencil is the menu bar glyph, and the app has its own icon.

Install

Open the disk image and drag FinderNotes to Applications.

Requires: macOS 14 or later. Universal for Apple silicon and Intel. Signed with a Developer ID certificate, notarised by Apple and stapled, so it opens without a Gatekeeper warning even offline.

Project page: https://jesperh.cv/apps/findernotes.html

FinderNotes 1.0

A quick-capture scratchpad for macOS, by Jesper GB Henriksen.

Press a global shortcut, a small floating editor appears, you write, you copy, it is gone again. Notes stay as cards in a rail below the editor and can be called back any time.

Menu bar only, no Dock icon. Native SwiftUI and AppKit, universal, about 1 MB.

Shortcuts

Key	Action
⌃⌥Space	Show or hide the panel, from any app
esc	Hide; focus returns to where you came from
⌘N	New note
⌘1 … ⌘9	Open the 1st to 9th card in the rail
⇧⌘C	Copy the whole note and close
⌘L	Into the side panel, or back

The shortcut is rebindable from the menu bar icon, and combinations already claimed by macOS or another app are greyed out rather than silently failing.

Install

Open the disk image and drag FinderNotes to Applications.

Requires: macOS, Apple silicon or Intel. Signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarised by Apple, so it opens without a Gatekeeper warning.

It asks for no permissions. The global shortcut uses RegisterEventHotKey, so macOS never prompts for Accessibility access.

Notes are stored in one file: ~/Library/Application Support/FinderNotes/notes.json

Project page: https://jesperh.cv/apps/findernotes.html

ExpressionGate 1.3.1

A free macOS audio plugin by Staiola Studio.

You control it by how loud you play. Quiet playing gives you one set of effects, playing harder gives you another, and digging in gives you a third. You set the three volume levels yourself and pick what each one does, so the sound changes without you touching a pedal.

Each level runs the same six effects in order: Amp, Fuzz, Pitch, Chorus, Echo and Verb. Stack mode adds effects as you cross more levels, Switch mode plays only the highest one you have reached.

What changed since 1.2.1

• VST3 is now included, so the plugin works in hosts that do not load Audio Units, Reaper and Bitwig among them. The release build now refuses to ship unless the VST3 actually loads.

Install

Open the .pkg and follow the installer. It installs:

/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/ExpressionGate.component
/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/ExpressionGate.vst3
/Applications/ExpressionGate.app

Restart your host so it rescans plugins. Logic Pro caches its plugin list and needs a full restart.

Requires: macOS 11 or newer. Signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarised by Apple. Same plugin identity as earlier versions, so this upgrades in place.

Project page: https://jesperh.cv/apps/expressiongate.html

ExpressionGate 1.2.1

A free macOS audio plugin by Staiola Studio.

You control it by how loud you play. Quiet playing gives you one set of effects, playing harder gives you another, and digging in gives you a third. You set the three volume levels yourself and pick what each one does, so the sound changes without you touching a pedal.

Each level runs the same six effects in order: Amp, Fuzz, Pitch, Chorus, Echo and Verb. Stack mode adds effects as you cross more levels, Switch mode plays only the highest one you have reached.

What changed since 1.0.1

• The Amp stage no longer allocates or prewarms on the audio thread, which is the kind of thing that causes clicks and dropouts under load
• Fixed an installer bug that could place the Audio Unit inside the Standalone app instead of the plug-ins folder
• Opens with nothing powered and the thresholds near the meter floor, so a fresh instance is quiet and you build up from there
• The amp and reverb dropdowns are captioned and wider, so you can read what is loaded
• The minimum macOS version is now set and checked as part of the release build

Same plugin identity as 1.0.1, so this upgrades in place. No need to remove the previous version first.

Install

Open the .pkg and follow the installer. It installs ExpressionGate.component to /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components and the standalone app to /Applications. Restart your host so it rescans plugins.

Requires: macOS 11 or newer. Signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarised by Apple.

Project page: https://jesperh.cv/apps/expressiongate.html

ExpressionGate 1.0.1

A free macOS audio plugin by Staiola Studio.

You control it by how loud you play. Quiet playing gives you one set of effects, playing harder gives you another, and digging in gives you a third. You set the three volume levels yourself and pick what each one does, so the sound changes without you touching a pedal.

Each level runs the same six effects in order: Amp, Fuzz, Pitch, Chorus, Echo and Verb. Stack mode adds effects as you cross more levels, Switch mode plays only the highest one you have reached.

What changed since 1.0.0

The plugin is now published under Staiola Studio rather than Dwan Audio. This is not only a label change: the Audio Unit manufacturer code and the bundle identifier changed with it, so macOS treats this as a different plugin from 1.0.0.

If you installed 1.0.0, delete these before installing, or you will see ExpressionGate listed twice in your host:

/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/ExpressionGate.component
/Applications/ExpressionGate.app

Doing this now while almost nobody has 1.0.0 installed, because changing plugin identity later would break saved sessions.

Install

Open the .pkg and follow the installer. It installs ExpressionGate.component to /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components and the standalone app to /Applications. Restart your host so it rescans plugins.

Requires: macOS 11 or newer. Signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarised by Apple.

Project page: https://jesperh.cv/apps/expressiongate.html

DK Dial 1.3.0

Danish radio as a physical panel in the menu bar, by Jesper GB Henriksen.

Six pads for the national stations, the programme now playing with its image and broadcast time, and a dial ringed with theme icons that reaches into the archive.

New in 1.3.0

Quitting moved to the dial's lamp. The quit chip used to sit at the foot of the panel, where a long track title could crowd it out of sight — one person could not find it at all. The lamp in the dial's corner never moves, so it lives there now, wearing a power symbol so it reads without a label.

The dial icons say what is playing. That left the lamp's old job homeless, so playback status moved out to the theme icons: the running theme lights white, breathes while its episode is fetched, and turns red if it fails. The unlit ring dropped to thirty percent so the lit one reads as lit rather than merely brighter.

The panel opens itself the first time. A menu bar app with no Dock icon and no window looks like nothing happened when you first open it. It now shows itself once, on the first launch only, so you can see where it lives.

The icon lost its white plate. The icon set had been generated onto a white rounded plate, which showed as a white square anywhere the background was not white.

Install

Open the disk image and drag DK Dial to Applications.

Requires: macOS 14 or later. Universal for Apple silicon and Intel. Signed with a Developer ID certificate, notarised by Apple and stapled, so it opens without a Gatekeeper warning even offline.

Project page: https://jesperh.cv/apps/dkdial.html