audio.cpp Windows portable v0.5.1

audio.cpp Windows portable v0.5.1

This stable maintenance release combines the upstream changes through
748c5e2 with the local Windows WebUI and updater distribution.

Highlights

• Removed Hugging Face package-update checks from the synchronous model-load
  response path, so the WebUI reports success as soon as the local backend is
  ready. Update information remains available in the download status area.
• Made Qwen3 forced alignment robust for punctuation-only transcript fragments.
  Such fragments now return their original text without word timestamps instead
  of failing normalization.
• Kept the Qwen3 ASR forced-alignment path from attempting alignment when the
  normalized transcript contains no alignable words.

Windows builds

• Updated CPU and CUDA audiocpp_cli, audiocpp_server, and audiocpp_gguf
  executables are included.
• Python environment changes: none
• CUDA runtime DLL changes: none
• Updater version: 1.1.1

Updating

Run update.bat from an existing updater-enabled Windows portable
installation. The stable channel updates directly to v0.5.1; no intermediate
release is required.

• Supported source versions: 0.2.0 and later
• Verified direct-upgrade matrix: 0.2.0, 0.2.1, 0.2.2, 0.3.0,
  0.4.0, 0.4.1, 0.4.2, and 0.5.0 to 0.5.1
• Updated components: app, core-cpu, and core-cuda

Portable releases older than 0.2.0 did not include the current updater
contract. Those installations require the one-time updater bootstrap before
they can use the stable channel.

The updater preserves downloaded models, custom voices, generated output, API
keys, logs, UI language preferences, and SpeakType configuration. If
validation fails, managed files are restored from _update\backup\.

Validation

• CPU and CUDA release binaries are synchronized into the portable release
  input.
• WebUI syntax and focused download/update tests pass.
• The updater acceptance suite validates every supported historical version as
  a direct source for v0.5.1.
• Release manifests, checksums, component indexes, and published assets are
  verified with the bundled minisign public key.