v0.6.2-beta

A patch release focused on stability and clarity. If you were hitting the macOS 26 crash when stopping or starting a recording, this is the build for you.

Crash fixes

• Audio engine tap lifecycle hardening (#134). AVAudioNode.installTap can raise an Objective-C NSException for things like a stale tap, an invalid input format, or a transient state during an audio route change. Swift cannot catch those, so the whole app was aborting with SIGABRT. This release wraps installTap, engine.start(), and removeTap in a small Objective-C exception bridge, validates the input format up front, removes any lingering tap before installing a new one, and fully resets engine state on failure so the UI no longer gets stuck in the red recording state.
• App state and audio engine lifecycle stabilization (#130, closes #129). Production AppState is now backed by a single process-wide instance, and all AudioEngine mutations (startRecording, stopRecording, forceReset, and the audio configuration change handler) are serialized through a dedicated queue. This removes a plausible race between route-change notifications and user-driven start/stop, and prevents duplicate production service graphs being created when SwiftUI recreates the App value during menu-bar scene setup.

UX improvements

• "Experimental" model badge (#137). The orange "Unoptimized" badge on the Models tab is renamed to "Experimental" with a hover tooltip that explains what it actually means: WhisperKit has not shipped a tuned variant of that model for your chip family, but your hardware can usually run it anyway. The confirmation alert wording is softened to match, the "Recommended for your device" line gets a clarifying subtitle that the recommendation is based on chip tuning rather than RAM, and the warning triangle on the Onboarding "Try Anyway" button is replaced with a sparkles icon. AppState also now logs the full WhisperKit recommendation triple (default, supported, disabled) at startup, which makes future "why is this model marked Experimental on my Mac?" questions answerable from the log file alone.

Website

• Footer cleanup (#128). Dropped duplicated cross-product links and added a Changelog link.

Thanks

Special thanks to @slatlasdev and @terrythomas for sticking with us through the macOS 26 crash, sending detailed crash reports, and confirming on the nightly that the fix held. This release would not have shipped without your patience.

Verifying the download

Checksums are attached to this release. Verify with:

shasum -a 256 -c checksums.txt