v0.23.1 — new ears for the lyrics, and Space works again

The lyrics engine has been replaced end to end: it hears sung words far more accurately and invents nothing into silence. A machine with the old engine is offered the new one once, at launch — nothing downloads until you say so. Separated songs stream instead of loading whole, cutting open time and memory sharply, on the computer and the phone. And on the computer, Space plays and pauses again after a button was clicked, instead of pressing that button again.

Движок распознавания слов заменён полностью: он гораздо точнее слышит спетые слова и ничего не выдумывает в тишине. Компьютер со старым движком получит одно предложение перейти на новый при запуске — ничего не скачивается без согласия. Разделённые песни передаются потоково, а не загружаются целиком — это заметно ускоряет открытие и экономит память на компьютере и на телефоне. А на компьютере пробел снова играет и ставит на паузу после нажатия кнопки, а не нажимает её ещё раз.

Mac and Windows:

• The lyrics engine is new, and it only listens now — no more online
  subtitle lookalikes. Whisper is gone; every transcription and every
  Check & align now runs on Qwen3-ASR, with a purpose-built aligner timing
  the words it heard. Across the songs it was measured on: it hears more of
  what is actually sung (word error 0.167 against 0.278 for songs with
  nothing to find online), it invents nothing — 55 phrases whisper wrote
  into pauses and instrumental breaks are gone, all of them — and it lands
  each word closer to where it is sung (median timing error 0.08s against
  0.19s). On a machine whose graphics card could accelerate neither
  engine it was measured faster than whisper too, not just more accurate.

• The switch is offered once, and the old model cleans up after
  itself. The recogniser and its aligner are one 3.5 GB download. If your
  copy of SingZ already has a whisper model on disk, the next launch opens
  the model manager once with the new one highlighted and says why —
  nothing downloads until you press Get, and if you close it, it does not
  ask again. Once the new engine is fully installed, the old whisper model
  is removed on its own.

• Re-running Check & align on a song you already checked is much
  faster. What the engine heard in a song's vocals is now kept beside it,
  so asking again — after editing a line, say — goes straight to timing the
  words instead of listening from scratch. On the songs it was measured on,
  a repeat came back three to six times faster.

• Space plays and pauses the song again, after clicking anything.
  Click Mute, a fader, or almost any other button, then hit Space: instead
  of playing or pausing, it pressed that button a second time — muting and
  unmuting, retapping the tempo. A recent change widened a rule meant for
  one dialog into every button on the song screen. Space is the
  song's again; a field you are typing into, a focused dialog and a
  fader's own arrow keys keep theirs.

• Cancelling a lyrics job gives you your words back, and a pick from
  Change… can no longer land in the wrong song. Press Cancel on a
  transcription or a Check & align and the lyrics you had went blank until
  you reopened the song — cancelling was being read as a verdict on the
  words, when it only means "stop, and keep what I had." It keeps them now.
  Picking a different set of words from Change… had the same gap from the
  other side: if you switched songs before the pick answered, it could be
  drawn into whatever song was open by then instead of the one you asked
  it for. Both are fixed now: cancelling keeps what you had, and a pick
  lands only in the song you made it for, however long it takes to answer.

• Opening a project from outside your library folder can no longer make
  SingZ sync itself in an endless loop. A project living outside the
  library — copied in from elsewhere, or opened straight from another
  drive — was correctly left out of every sync, and that correct skip was
  then read as new work, which queued the next sync, which skipped it
  again, forever: a real Drive listing every few seconds for as long as
  SingZ stayed open. It syncs everything it should and quietly leaves that
  one alone now.

Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android:

• Separated songs open faster and hold far less in memory. Every split
  since 0.23.0 keeps its lead and backing vocal lanes uncompressed, and
  that format was being decoded in full rather than streamed — on the
  phones, a five-minute separated song held over 800 MB in memory where an
  ordinary song holds under 20; on the computer, opening one took several
  times as long as an all-compressed song. Those lanes stream now, the same
  way the rest of the song already did.