v2.0.96

PCPanel Controller Software [2.0.85] – [2.0.96]

• #157 - Fixed the interface opening in your browser on every PC start even with "Open in browser when PCPanel starts" switched off. If Windows starts PCPanel twice when you sign in — which happens when both startup options ended up registered, or when Windows restores your previous session's apps alongside the startup entry — the second one was read as you asking to open the interface. A start Windows performs by itself is no longer treated that way; opening PCPanel yourself while it is already running still brings up the interface as before. Installing this version also clears a leftover startup entry when you switch between the normal and the "run as administrator" startup option, so PCPanel is only started once.

• New Report a problem option, on the bug button next to the settings icon and in the tray menu. It asks what went wrong, how to reproduce it and what you expected, then saves a zip with the logs and details next to your settings and opens both the already filled-in GitHub issue and the folder holding the zip, so all you do is attach it. Passwords and tokens are removed from anything it collects, and you choose what goes in: the log and system details are included by default, your configuration only if you tick it. Open the zip and check it before attaching, especially if you use OBS, MQTT, Home Assistant or Discord.

• When something goes wrong, the error message itself now offers Report this, which starts that report with the error already written down and the failure details attached.

• PCPanel now records more about failed requests in its log, so a problem you report can be diagnosed from the log instead of guessed at. Requests are logged to a separate access.log next to the existing log file.

• #145 - Fixed the panel lights staying off after booting the PC, until any lighting setting was toggled. Windows lock detection was inferred from an internal desktop check that also fails while the desktop is still being set up right after logon (and during a UAC prompt, or a desktop switch), so a false "workstation locked" switched the panels off with nothing left to switch them back on. Lock and unlock now come from Windows itself.

• As a result the panels also switch off when you lock the PC, instead of only once you click through to the password/PIN prompt, and come back on when you sign in.

• (Windows) Restored monitor-off/on and going-to-sleep detection, which had never actually started: the hidden window that receives those notifications failed to be created on every launch, so the panels only dimmed on lock. They now switch off when the monitors go to sleep and when Windows suspends, and light up again on wake.

• #145 - Fixed the panel lights coming on after booting the PC but switching off again a few seconds later, staying off until a lighting setting was changed. The previous fix helped when restarting the app, but right after a boot Windows itself isn't fully up yet, and the app could mistake that for the PC being locked — and switch the lights off. Locking and unlocking still turn the lights off and back on as intended.

• New setting "Lights off when locked or asleep" (General, on by default): controls whether the panel lights switch off when you lock the PC, the monitors go to sleep or the PC suspends. Turn it off if your lights ever switch off when they shouldn't — the app then leaves the lighting alone entirely (the lights still turn off when the app closes).

• Launching PCPanel while it is already running no longer switches the panel lights off. The second launch used to start up far enough to take over the panel and then, as it exited, turn the lights off on the already-running app — leaving them dark until you next changed a lighting setting. It now recognises the running app and steps aside immediately, opening the interface instead of touching the panel.

• The local web interface is now access-controlled, so only PCPanel itself can open it and other programs on your PC can't reach it. Open the interface from the tray icon (right-click the PCPanel tray icon → Open PCPanel). If you ever land on a lock screen, it simply means the page was opened or reloaded outside the app — an old tab or bookmark, or a reload after the app restarted. To unlock it, reopen the interface from the tray icon (or use the button on the lock screen itself).

• New Open web UI button action: assign it to a PCPanel button to open the interface in your browser whenever you like — another quick way back in if you hit the lock screen.

• New tray menu item Copy UI link: copies a one-time link to the interface onto your clipboard, ready to paste into any browser — handy if the interface didn't open on its own.

• New Set clipboard button action: copies a piece of text you choose onto the clipboard when the button is pressed.

• Saved integration secrets (OBS, MQTT, Home Assistant and Discord passwords and tokens) are no longer sent back to the browser: each shows as already configured, and you only enter a value when you want to change it.

• Security fix: closed a hole in the web interface's access control (2.0.86). Another program on your PC could still reach the interface and change your settings — or shut PCPanel down — by dressing up the web address in a way the access check did not recognise but the app still accepted. Websites you visit were never able to read your settings this way. Updating is enough; nothing to change on your side.

• Fixed crashes in the Windows audio layer. Plugging or unplugging an audio device, or an app releasing its audio session, could crash PCPanel — the handlers that react to those changes could run while the objects they belonged to were being destroyed. A device reporting an unexpected value for its name is no longer read as if it were text. Also fixed a crash while shutting down with the focused-app watcher still running.

• Fixed the App volume action doing nothing when it was aimed at the default output device (it logged an error instead), including on a PC with no default playback device.

• (Linux) Fixed apps coming back at full volume instead of the level your dial had them at. An App volume dial controls any stream whose program name or window title matches what you picked, ignoring capitalisation and a trailing .exe — but when the app started playing again, its volume was only restored when the program name matched exactly. So an app you had picked by its window title (Zen, whose program is zen-bin) came back untouched. Restoring now uses the same rule as the dial, so anything a dial controls gets its volume restored, and the level the focus dial last set for an app is restored the same way.

• (Linux) AppImage and Flatpak installs that follow snapshot builds now update to a stable release when one comes out, instead of staying on snapshots indefinitely. They stay on the snapshot channel afterwards, so once development moves past that release you carry on receiving snapshots as before. A Flatpak picks this up on its next flatpak update.

• (Linux, AppImage only) If you are running a snapshot AppImage from before this release, download it once by hand — from this release page — and replace your existing file. Snapshot AppImages now share a single update channel instead of one per branch, and which channel an AppImage follows is fixed when it is built, so an existing file cannot move itself across. Until you replace it, PCPanel keeps telling you a new version is available and "Update & restart" appears to do nothing: it is checking the channel that no longer receives builds. Stable AppImage downloads are unaffected, and once you have replaced the file this is a one-time thing.

• #149 - Dials and sliders are no longer limited to linear or logarithmic. A new Curves page in the settings lets you shape how far you turn a knob into how much you get. Every curve has an Amount slider that slides the response smoothly between straight-through and a steep logarithmic taper — so if linear wastes the top half of your slider and logarithmic wastes the bottom half, you can settle anywhere in between. Negative amounts flip it around, putting the fine control at the top of the throw instead.

• For full control, switch a curve to Custom and drag its shape by hand: drag a point, click the graph to add one, right-click to remove one. Curves are named and reusable, so you can set one up once and use it on as many knobs and sliders as you like.

• A dial action's Input mapping graph now draws the whole picture: the curve the control is set to, the part of the throw the action ignores dimmed out, and where Trim min/max bounds the result. The curve you configured is drawn faintly behind it, so you can see what narrowing Start/End costs.

• Linear and Logarithmic are still there and unchanged, and controls you have already set up keep behaving exactly as before. You can now edit those two as well — retuning Logarithmic changes every control that uses it at once, which is the quickest way to adjust everything in one go, and Reset puts it back. Pick a curve per control on its control page.

• Fixed the Wave Link integration silently dropping out after a PC restart or resume from sleep and staying dead until you restarted PCPanel. The connection could be left looking alive when it wasn't — so nothing tried to reconnect — and Wave Link actions quietly did nothing. PCPanel now detects a stalled connection and reconnects on its own.

• Wave Link now shows as connected only when it can actually be controlled. The indicator used to go green as soon as PCPanel had loaded a channel list, and that list stays around after the connection drops — so Wave Link could sit there looking connected while every action did nothing. It now reports the live connection, and Wave Link actions refuse and say why instead of disappearing silently.

• Wave Link now recovers on its own when it stops accepting what PCPanel sends. A connection can keep receiving from Wave Link while nothing PCPanel sends gets through — the integration reads as connected, and every dial and button quietly does nothing until you restart PCPanel. PCPanel now treats commands Wave Link never answers as a dead connection and reconnects.

• Fixed Wave Link staying uncontrollable for minutes after you start the PC, until you restarted PCPanel. Wave Link takes a while to come up on a cold boot, and every attempt to reach it before then made PCPanel wait longer before trying again — so by the time Wave Link was finally ready, PCPanel had settled into checking only once every few minutes. It now spots the moment Wave Link starts up and connects right then.

• Fixed Wave Link actions being sent into a connection that had opened but never finished starting up. Wave Link can accept the connection and then not answer PCPanel's opening questions, which left PCPanel holding a connection it could not use — the actions went out and nothing happened. They now wait until the connection is genuinely usable.

• #152 - (Windows) Fixed every knob and button dying until PCPanel was restarted, most often after waking the PC from sleep. The lights and the overlay carried on as normal, so it looked like only the volume had stopped — but keystrokes, media keys and profile switches were dead too. An audio device changing state (waking up, or a wireless headset switching itself off) could leave PCPanel stuck inside Windows' own audio notifications, with everything else queued behind it forever.

• Fixed PCPanel reconnecting to Wave Link every twenty seconds indefinitely when Wave Link kept accepting connections without answering. It now spaces the attempts out, and writes down which question went unanswered so the cause is visible in the log rather than being guessed at.

• Wave Link messages are now sent one after another instead of all at once. A rapid burst — a dial being turned quickly, or the batch of questions PCPanel asks the moment it connects — could have part of it dropped on the way out, with no sign that anything had gone missing.

• Fixed every dial and button on the panel going dead after starting the PC, until PCPanel was restarted. The panel looked perfectly alive — the dials still moved in the interface and the volume overlay still popped up — but nothing actually happened, for Wave Link, app volume, device volume, focus volume and buttons alike. In the moments after a boot, while Windows is still reporting its audio devices, PCPanel's audio layer and those notifications could each end up waiting on the other, and that froze the single thread that carries out every dial and button action. Nothing was written to the log, which is why this looked like the Wave Link integration dropping out. PCPanel no longer waits on Windows audio while holding that lock, and if any action ever does hang in future it is now named in the log instead of the panel quietly going dead.

• #151 - (Linux) Anything that depends on the focused app now tells you when your desktop can't do it, instead of failing silently. "Find focused app" would report only "Could not read the focused app", and focus volume would do nothing at all, with not one line in the log to explain it. Reading the focused window needs help from the desktop, and only KDE Plasma (Wayland and X11) and X11 sessions on any desktop can give it — on a non-KDE Wayland session such as GNOME there is no way for an application to ask, so these features cannot work there. PCPanel now says exactly that, in the message the interface shows, in a desktop notification, and in the log — naming your desktop session and quoting what each helper reported.

• #151 - (Linux) A bug report now carries all of that on its own. Reports include a Focused-window detection section listing your desktop, session type and the live result of each helper, so a focus-volume problem can be diagnosed from the attachment instead of a round of questions. Previously the report gave no hint of which desktop was even in use. That section names the title of the window that was focused — it is what identifies Wine/Steam games, whose window class is replaced by a Steam id — so it can name a document, page or conversation. It is on its own labelled line, shortened, only included when you leave System information ticked, and the report dialog now says so: check it before attaching.

• #151 - Fixed the app picker not showing programs you started after opening the PCPanel window — the reason "close and reopen PCPanel" was the only thing that helped. The list of running programs was fetched once when the page was opened and then kept, so opening "Add app" showed you the programs that were running back then, however long ago that was. Reopening PCPanel only worked because it opens a fresh page. The list is now re-read each time you open the picker.

• (Linux) Note that on Linux this list can only contain programs that are playing sound right now — on Windows it is every running program. A program that is open but silent has no audio stream for PCPanel to find, so it will not appear until it plays something.

• #151 - (Linux, Flatpak) Fixed the media keys (play/pause, next, previous) never finding a player. Every media action failed with "No MPRIS media player found" even with music playing, because the sandbox hid the running players from PCPanel.

• (Linux) A stuck helper can no longer hold up the panel: resolving the focused window now gives up after three seconds instead of waiting forever.

• #150 - Fixed "Could not save assignment" appearing on every change to a dial or button — including removing an action — with nothing saved, while the rest of the interface kept working normally. It happened when the active profile's name contains a #, ? or /, and also when the profile the device was set to was no longer there. Both now save, and a profile file in the second state puts itself right the next time PCPanel starts, so there is nothing to rename or set up again.

• #153 - Fixed the Advanced default device action doing nothing at all. Pressing the button changed no device, whichever devices you picked. The action is built to find a device by its name, but the four fields handed it something else entirely, which matched nothing — so it quietly did nothing. Existing buttons start working again as they are; there is nothing to set up again.

• The Advanced default device fields now take a piece of a device's name, typed in. Type Yeti and the action picks your Yeti microphone — even after Windows renames it, which it does whenever the number in a name like Speakers (2- USB Audio) changes. You can still pick a device from the list instead.

• Audio device lists can now be searched. Every place that asks you to choose an audio device has a filter box, so you can type a few letters instead of hunting through the list.

• A bug report now records what every part of PCPanel was doing at the moment you made it. When the panel goes dead while the interface carries on as normal, that is the one piece of evidence that names the action which got stuck — the last time this happened it took a release to find without it. It is included when you leave System information ticked, and describes only the program's own workings: no file names, no window titles, nothing you typed.

• #154 - Fixed a keyboard shortcut losing its Ctrl, Shift, Alt or Win. A shortcut set with the Keystroke action was sent as the bare key, so a button set to Ctrl+C typed a plain c. Shortcuts from an older version kept working, which is why this only showed up on ones you set recently. Thanks to @hayhany for finding it and sending a fix.

• More keys work in a shortcut: the arrow keys, Page Up/Down, Home/End, Backspace, Delete, the space bar and punctuation. You could already record them, but the button then did nothing.

• (Windows) Holding Shift with an arrow key now selects text instead of only moving the cursor, so Shift+Left and Ctrl+Shift+Left do what you would expect.

• Shortcuts that can't be recorded can now be put together by hand. The recorder has Ctrl, Shift, Alt and Win buttons you can switch on yourself, for combinations Windows or your browser keeps for itself — press the plain key, then switch the modifiers on to build something like Win+D or Alt+Left.

• Type text now takes more than one line, and pressing Tab puts a tab in the text instead of jumping out of the field.

• #155 - Fixed "Change colour when muted" doing nothing on a control muted by a mute button. If a knob's press was set to Device mute, App mute or Focused-app mute, pressing it muted the sound but left the light on its normal colour. The muted colour only ever followed a volume action, so a control that mutes without also having Device volume or App volume on the same knob was never seen as muted. It now follows the mute button's own target as well. Set your muted colour to black to have the light switch off while muted.

• A knob set to Focused-app volume or Focused-app mute now changes to its muted colour too, and follows along as you switch between programs.

• The same fix applies to Voicemeeter: a knob that mutes a strip or bus from its button now takes the muted colour, where before only a Voicemeeter volume knob did.

• #155 - Fixed "Change colour when muted" never doing anything at all on a panel that was set up in PCPanel 1.x. Each knob records which audio device its muted colour follows, and versions before 2.0 wrote the words "Follow what is controlled by this knob/slider" into that setting. Since 2.0 those words were read as the name of an audio device to look up rather than as "follow this knob" — no device is called that, so the knob was never considered muted and no muted colour was ever applied, in any colour. Nothing showed that anything was wrong: the setting looked right on screen and the mute itself worked. Affected knobs start working on the first launch after updating, which also tidies the old wording out of your settings, and your previous settings file is kept alongside as a backup.