v0.9.6-alpha

Cassette v0.9.6

New Stuff

• All effects now support segmentation.
• Updated the context menu sound effects.
• Added automatic error reporting.
• Added a feedback button.
• Significantly improved slider UX - now you can just click anywhere on the bar to set the value.

Effects

• New "Mode" parameter for the "BPM" effect.
• New "Decay Length" parameter for the "BPM" effect.
• New "Duty Cycle" parameter for the "Strobe" effect.
• New "Tail Fade" parameter for the "Chase" effect.
• New "Invert" parameter for the "Chase" effect.
• New "Invert" parameter for the "Fill" effect.
• New "Density" parameter for the "Sparkle" effect.
• New "Cluster Mode" parameter for the "Glitch" effect.
• New "Center Offset" parameter for the "Ripple" effect.

Fixes

• Fixed lag when opening the context menu.
• Audio Re - trim menu: BPM is now loaded directly from the save file instead of being auto - detected. But you still can auto - detect it.

Cassette Receiver

Sorry, I kinda... forgot about this part. But anyway:

• Fixed connection / disconnection animations.
• Added connection / disconnection animations for 4a and 4b (and full support for these models in general, of course).
• You can now launch Cassette Receiver as a normal app just by clicking the icon. Kinda useless, but it feels way nicer.
• Added "A" track support.
• Cassette Receiver has its own repo now! Check https://www.github.com/chips047/Cassette-Receiver.

Some of your compositions may not work with the new version. Sorry. These changes will stop at v1.0.

v0.9.5-alpha

Cassette v0.9.5

What's New

• Post - load audio editing is finally here! You can now re - trim your track, tweak fades, or change the BPM anytime after loading it.
• Fresh icons in the Project Menu, all hand - drawn by me :)
• A new, proper tutorial is now included to help you get started without the guesswork.
• Track names always stay on top of glyphs and now dynamically shift their color to match the background so they are always readable.
• Keyframe shortcut: When Keyframes mode is active on a glyph, you can now tap the [ and ] keys to quickly raise or lower brightness points.
• Animated history: Undoing and redoing glyph movements or length changes is now smoothly animated.
• A new setting: Toggleable glyph rounded corners.

---

Visuals & Glyph Tweaks

• Smarter rendering for tiny glyphs:

  • Glyphs smaller than 15px now switch to sharp corners. This looks much cleaner at small scales and gives a nice FPS boost.
  • Glyph borders dynamically shrink from 2px down to 0px as glyphs get smaller, keeping things clean and readable.
  • Selected tiny glyphs keep their default border thickness so you never lose track of what you have selected.

• Better Audio Delay Setup animations. Added a textbox so you can set the milliseconds yourself.

---

Performance & Optimization

• Massive rendering overhaul: Thanks to a new occlusion system, hidden glyphs aren't rendered at all anymore. The app easily hits a rock - solid 120 FPS. Because of this:
  • Noticeably higher frame rates across the board.
  • No more lag spikes when spam - spawning glyphs.
  • Silky - smooth zooming, no matter how crowded your canvas is.
  • Marquee selection and dragging still work seamlessly on glyphs tucked behind others.
  • Bulk - deleting large amounts of glyphs is significantly faster.
• Less disk space used: Save files are lighter, and if your audio track does not need trimming, the app will no longer generate a redundant cropped audio file.
• Lighter footprint: Completely dropped Mutagen from Cassette dependencies.
• Optimized undo / redo actions.
• Optimized glyph deletion.
• Optimized glyph move and resize.

---

Bug Fixes

• Fixed weird playhead behavior when it is at the end.
• More fixes for Floating Window incorrect sizes.
• Fixed an issue where you could paste massive walls of text into textboxes that were never meant to handle them.
• Fixed a window bug where short audio files combined with a low default zoom caused compositions to open at a broken scale instead of going fullscreen.
• Fixed weird composer window scaling when resizing mid - opening animation.
• Fixed a glitch where spawning a glyph right as playback began would launch it completely outside the composer bounds.
• Spawning glyphs during playback now respects your audio latency settings (positive delay advances the playhead, negative delay pulls it back).
• Fixed multiple stability issues when GPU rendering is turned off.
• Fixed glyphs loading into incorrect positions when opening saved compositions.
• Squashed several errors that happened while loading audio files.
• Fixed broken Undo / Redo (Ctrl + Z / Ctrl + Y) behavior when editing Keyframes.
• Fixed odd slider behavior in context menus: previously, moving the Gap slider in the Chase effect from 0 to 1 did nothing until you moved it to 2, after which 1 would suddenly work. It now updates properly on every step.

---

Under the Hood (For Nerds)

• Extracted most hardcoded values into a clean, dedicated Constants.py file.
• Split oversized, monolithic files into smaller, modular components for cleaner and more maintainable code.
• Applied general performance and memory optimizations across all core systems.

v0.9.4-alpha

Cassette v0.9.4

Fixes

• Fixed 4a / 4b export errors.
• Fixed errors caused by disabling Floating Window animations.
• Resolved all issues with the Glyph Stack. Refined glyph spawn behavior when the Glyph Stack is expanded.
• Fixed an issue where animations occasionally failed to sync with the music beat and appeared sluggish.

New

• Expanded customizability with a variety of new timeline scroll settings.
• Introduced audio latency adjustment to seamlessly synchronize headphone playback.
• Added a new Audio Buffer setting. Increase it to resolve playback stutters, or decrease it on high - end systems for lower latency.
• Added a Frame Rate Limit setting. Lower your FPS cap to optimize performance on low - end systems.

Optimization

• Major performance enhancements across the editor, delivering a noticeable boost in FPS.

v0.9.3.1-alpha

Cassette v0.9.3.1

• Fixed Phone (2) 4th track zones incorrect work.
• Added panning to playhead UI sounds.
• Removed some useless debug logs.

v0.9.3-alpha

Cassette v0.9.3

Sounds

• Added 17 new granular settings to toggle individual UI sound effects on or off - mute just the ones that annoy you, keep the rest.
• Extended UI sound effects to cover a wider variety of system and user actions - more of the interface now gives you audio feedback, not just the obvious clicks.
• All sounds got some Haas - stereo! Wear headphones - a tiny delay between channels widens everything out, makes clicks and pops feel less flat and centered.
• All sounds got normalized - consistent loudness across every effect, no more random loud-quiet jumps between sounds.

New Features & Improvements

• Added Master Track "A" - a new track, always shown first in your timeline as A, lets you light up your entire glyph interface at once - every zone together - without animating each one by hand. Great for beat drops, transitions, or full-device flashes. Track A automatically adapts its behavior to your specific phone:
  • Phone (1) / Phone (2) - Track A blends all zones into one combined effect, giving you a quick way to flash the whole device without juggling multiple tracks.
  • Phone (4a) / (4b) - alongside Track A, each of the 7 / 5 individual zone tracks stays available, so you can jump straight to lighting up any single zone without opening the zone-editing menu.
  • Phone (3a) - since every zone here is already fully segmented, Track A lets you choreograph effects that sweep across all three glyphs at once - like a single light circling the entire device.
• Introduced a new setting to lower click latency, significantly improving interface responsiveness - buttons and toggles now react closer to the moment you actually click them.
• Added a brand-new vibrant UI animation preset called "Electric" - a punchier, higher-contrast look for anyone who wants the interface to feel more alive.
• Implemented dedicated click animations for all buttons across the application - every button now gives you a distinct little press-feedback instead of a flat state change.
• Upgraded checkboxes, selectors, and sliders with smoother, more fluid animations - transitions ease in and out instead of snapping between states.
• Added the ability to quickly copy error details and diagnostics to the clipboard for easier troubleshooting - one click and you've got everything needed to paste into a bug report.
• Introduced new customization settings specifically for menu scroll areas - tune how scrolling in menus looks and feels to match the rest of the UI.
• Enhanced and modernized the overall visual design of control elements - buttons, sliders, and selectors got a cleaner, more refined look across the board.
• Glyphs, selectors, checkboxes, sliders, buttons - all running at 120 FPS now - the whole interface feels noticeably smoother, especially on high refresh-rate displays.
• 90% of animations now run through a single unified animation engine called Loom - fewer inconsistencies between how different parts of the UI move, and a much easier place to tune performance going forward.
• Animation multiplier is now global - it affects audio, buttons, sliders, marquee-area, windows, etc - one setting to speed up or slow down motion across the entire app instead of per-element.
• Slightly enhanced glitch animations in the textbox - a bit more texture and randomness in the easter-egg glitch text.
• Congratulations!!!!!!!! You can now close the window using Alt+F4!!!! - yes, this took way too long, no it's not a joke.
• CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!!!!!!!! You can now move windows on Linux without the Meta key!!!!! (mostly...) - drag from the title bar like a normal window manager expects, most of the time.
• Improved behavior on non-standard screen resolutions - windows, docks, and overlays position themselves more reliably on unusual aspect ratios and DPI scales.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that caused error windows to render at excessively large, oversized dimensions.
• Disabled the ability to accidentally start playback while a composition is being ejected.
• Resolved minor audio glitching and overlapping sounds during drag-and-drop interactions.
• The update window is now fully scrollable and capped so it never exceeds the user's screen size.
• Resolved UI layout breaks and misalignment issues in the Floating Window interface.
• Fixed a bug that caused errors while reading the tutorial.
• Fixed incorrect stack number behavior.
• Fixed the tooltip not hiding after brightness changes via [ / ].
• Fixed an incorrect argument order in a function call that could've caused breakage down the line: self.animate_stack_items(group, direction, step, group_size).
• Fixed errors while using "Glitch" / "Classic" animation styles.

Critical Optimization

• Fixed Mini Waveform Preview rendering, which was firing 120 times per second and dropping FPS by 50% specifically during fullscreen playback.
• Fixed a duplicate signal emit that was also quietly eating into FPS.
• Switched rendering mode to Full, since GL can't do partial repaints anyway, and the "smart" mode was just burning extra CPU for nothing.
• Beat lines now only render the ones actually visible - a logic bug previously drew everything left of the viewport's right edge.
• Trimmed the number of numeric comparisons in beat line rendering for a small extra speed bump.
• Significantly optimized mouse event handling.
• Fixed a missing stop_batching call in some operations that could've corrupted saves.

Oh My God Bruh

• Linux ARM / Windows ARM support. I can't test that, but I succesfull built these packages. Looking for tests...

v0.9.2-alpha

Cassette v0.9.2
Just a few fixes.

Fixes

• Stopped .wav files from getting deleted when you close the Audio Setup Window.
• Fixed the placeholders in the BPM Textbox.
• Patched the UI sound settings that weren't working.
• Fixed the tooltip animations.
• Tooltips can finally move around on Linux Wayland.
• Fixed marquee selection box jitter during playback.
• Fixed font heights on Linux.
• Fixed errors when changing the Floating Window Animations setting.
• Fixed duplicate UI sound triggers during Drag & Drop.
• Fixed an issue where the Mini Preview Widget didn't reset its position when changing compositions.
• Fixed abnormal playback speed when switching compositions.
• Fixed abnormal playback speed if you spam Alt + F4 on a Floating Window.

Optimization

• Cut down on memory usage during rendering by caching colors and brushes - this should give the speed a little boost.
• Optimized the player's "hot" functions (the ones that run thousands of times a second). They're compiled now and super fast, so the player uses way fewer resources.
• The ADB server for real - time ringtone visualization now opens only once, instead of restarting every single time the app scans for devices.
• Noticeably boosted performance on Linux.
• Reorganized the UI sounds folder.
• Optimized BPM animations by merging 4 BPM animation timers into one singleton.
• Optimized timeline scroll by merging 4 timers into 2.
• Tile generation doesn't affect FPS now.
• Now, tiles are being generated with a compiled code.

New

• You can now expand glyph stacks to make editing a lot easier.
• 5 new effects in the player. Not used. Yet. Hm.
• Migrated to PySide6 (Or PyQt6... I can't decide yet).
• Significantly improved handling of non - standard display scales and resolutions.
• Cassette now notifies you about new updates automatically.
• Visual enhancement in Trim Widget.
• The playhead now has... animations... too...
• Improved the file hover effects during Drag & Drop.
• Added new keyboard shortcuts:
  • Home & End to jump to the start and end of the track.
  • Shift + Arrows for faster playhead movement.
  • Ctrl + D to quickly duplicate selected glyphs.
  • [ and ] to quickly adjust brightness.
• UI sounds can no longer be spammed by holding down a keyboard key.
• Zoom is now smooth.

v0.9.1-alpha

Cassette v0.9.1

Just some fixes.

Compositor

• Mini Preview Widget: Fixed an issue where the audio position would change on hover without a mouse click. This bug primarily occurred on Linux systems.
• The Compositor now features rounded corners. Wow.

Audio Setup Window

• Fixed non - critical errors during audio loading.

Animation Engine

• Fixed interpolation snapping at the end of animations. This means windows aren't transparent now if animations are enabled.

Settings

• Added a setting to customize the BPM animation style.

Project Menu

• Improved UI responsiveness during composition loading. You can no longer launch two compositions simultaneously, preventing potential issues and memory leaks.

Something for Developers...

• The Loom Animation Engine will soon be released as a standalone library for your projects. It will support PyQt5, PyQt6, PySide2, PySide6, and include a special compatibility mode for other GUI libraries.

v0.9.0-alpha

Cassette v0.9.0

Reworked Glyph rendering

• Significantly reduced chances of visual desync

Improved Undo / Redo system

• Increased maximum history size to 1000 actions (Well I can make it even bigger but... why?)

Audio

• New engine for UI sounds: sound system is now more stable and less prone to glitches.
• The player has been rewritten using the miniaudio library, which is lighter and faster than sounddevice.

Performance & Optimization
Cassette is now noticeably lighter, and more efficient.

• Removed dependency on pygame entirely.
• Fixed extremely slow startup on macOS.
• Introduced a custom built-in FFmpeg build (~6MB).
• Overall application size significantly reduced.
• Animation update pipeline optimized. Even smoother.
• Fixed major lag when copying large amounts of glyphs.
• Greatly improved stability during fast project switching.
• Startup time on Linux is as fast as 200 ms.

Compositor

• Fixed scaling issues: Position reset and incorrect position in Mini Preview Widget.

Project Menu

• Added Search Textbox.

Textbox

• Fixed textbox cursor distortions.

Export Menu

• You can now add a watermark to your composition. Supports cyrillic, numbers, symbols, upper / lower letters.

Settings

• Settings menu got scroll area, so it's not giant now.

On - phone Visualization
Working with devices is now faster and more seamless.

• Real - Time Visualizer now connects once per session

No more constant reconnecting.
Persistent connection between phone and Cassette.

Cassette Receiver

• Updated to work with 4a, but needs testing.
• Enhanced speed management.
• When you create a glyph, it pulses on your phone.

Features

• Added Import function for:

BNGC files
Label files

• Keyframe - Based Brightness Control

A new way to control Glyph brightness. Hold Alt and move the keyframes.
Accessible via: Effect Menu → Fade.
4 easings supported.

• Effects

Some effects were removed as they can be easily recreated, while new effects were added.
Added additional settings to some effects.

• Glyphtone Editor

A tool to crop your ringtones.

• 4a Support.

For Nerds / Devs
Yes, the codebase also got its life together.

• Adopted Single Source of Truth architecture.

Fewer state - related bugs and desyncs.

• Reduced technical debt (less hacks, more logic).
• Removed wildcard imports.
• Improved overall code structure and maintainability.
• Added type annotations.
• Unified code style across the project.
• Renamed functions for better readability.
• Removed unnecessary _ prefixes where meaningless.
• ~90% of files were updated and optimized.
• General editing performance significantly improved.
• Project folder is moved to $USER$/Cassette/Songs

Don't forget to reinstall Cassette Receiver!

v0.8.0-alpha

UI & UX

• Solid Glyphs: Glyphs no longer blink; they now remain solid for a more comfortable viewing experience.
• Enhanced Tooltips: Improved tooltip information and phrasing (e.g., corrected segment indexing from "0, 1, 2" to "1, 2, 3").
• BPM Textbox: Refined the visual style of the BPM textbox and centered the text.
• Fixed Misalignments: Resolved layout issues within the Audio Setup Dialog.
• Context Menu Fix: Fixed a bug where the context menu wouldn't open if a glyph's brightness was set to 5%.
• Tooltip Padding: Adjusted padding for better visual consistency.

Features & Enhancements

• New Animation Engine: Ported both Tooltips and the Marquee to a new engine for smoother animations.
• Variable Speed: The Cassette Receiver now supports real - time speed adjustments.
• Improved Audio Loading: Faster audio file loading and near-instant BPM detection.

Optimizations

• Power Efficiency: The animation engine is no longer initialized when animations are disabled, significantly reducing GPU load and battery drain.
• Glyph Visualizer: Optimized the visualizer logic to ensure all segments maintain uniform length.
• Stability: Improved system stability when running with animations toggled off.

Fixes

• Audio Logic: Resolved an issue where audio remained muted indefinitely after a track ended.
• Segmentation Glyph Logic: Fixed multiple glyph segmentation errors. Fixed Glyph Visualizer layouts.

Internal Changes (For Nerds)

• Refactored Settings Logic: Overhauled the logic for settings within the Floating Window.
• Modular UI: Decoupled the UI codebase into multiple files for better maintainability and readability.
• Cleaner Code: * Introduced new helper classes (e.g., Label, LineButtons) to streamline code.
  • Renamed various methods for better functional clarity.
  • Removed "hacky" workarounds and deprecated methods.
  • Reduced overall line count while increasing readability.
• Project Structure: Overhauled folder organization for better project logic.

v0.7.0-alpha

Cassette v0.7.0

Fixes

• Fixed a crash when cropping .flac files.
• Smoothed out Floating Window antialiasing.
• Keybinds now play nice with different keyboard layouts.
• Patched EGL failure during startup on certain Linux distros.
• Axed double WAV conversion - CPU usage is now much lower.
• Fixed those weird waveforms that appeared during silence.
• The window now closes instantly (no tape stop effect) if the audio is silent.
• Added a smart fix for MP3 files disguised with a .wav extension - they get converted properly now.
• Fixed Visualizator cahche being saved to a savefile.

Critical Fixes

• Fixed cache cleanup. App is stopped from hoarding gigabytes of temp audio files on your disk.

Cool Stuff

• Added "D" keybind to quickly tweak duration.

• Added "B" keybind to quickly adjust brightness.

• Added "S" keybind to quickly set speed.

• Text cursor now blinks in sync with the beat - stay groovy.

• Added "No Tilt" option in "Window Hover Smoothing" settings.

• Support for Drag and Drop: just toss an audio file into the window to import it.

• Undo / redo mechanics.

Animations & Visuals

• New Animation Engine - 120+ FPS, smooth mixing, and heavy optimization.
• Added "Classic" animation preset - for those missing the old - school Cassette vibes.
• Retuned all animations for a tighter feel.
• Normalized movement logic - animations won't be slowed down even if your PC lags.
• Enhanced Floating Window stability and slightly buffed its appear time.

Misc & UI

• First launch startup sound now defaults to 35% (save your ears).
• Shaved down package sizes.
• Massive code refactor - cleaner under the hood.
• Playback position is now shown in the window title within Audio Setupper.
• Audio Setupper: "Loading the audio" text is now left - aligned to match the layout.

Error Handling

Added specific error windows for:

• Broken or corrupted audio files.
• Files currently blocked by another program.
• Video files that don't actually contain audio streams.
• Audio files being moved while they're still loading.

Optimizations

• Optimized the BPM remove animation.
• Optimized Floating Window rendering, fewer stutters.
• Optimized save management.