Highlights

• Supertonic-3 and PocketTTS show their license Accept button again, so they can be enabled (#2017)
• An engine that can't run on your platform says so, instead of telling you to install it (#2018)
• MOSS-TTS-v1.5, Confucius4-TTS, dots.tts, Supertonic-3 and PocketTTS install in one click, each in its own environment, so switching engines and back never breaks a working one (#2015, #2016)
• A pronunciation entry that is stored but not applied yet says so, instead of looking like it did not match (#1949)
• A bare 500 report now names the backend error class, so two unrelated faults stop filing the same issue (#1773)
• A rejected dubbing source language now names the code it rejected (#1960)
• The first-run install log is kept on disk instead of vanishing with the setup screen (#1847)
• bun run desktop reclaims port 3900 from a backend the app itself left running, instead of refusing to start (#1974)
• A dictation shortcut another app already owns now says so, instead of silently doing nothing (#1858)
• Quitting on Windows is no longer reported as a crash on the next launch (#1898)
• A Reduce motion switch in Settings, for calm without changing your whole system (#1857)
• A light theme, and System Auto now follows a light-mode OS instead of staying dark (#1973) — thanks CoDe-ReDz!
• Generating from a one-character input now says the input was too short, instead of quoting a convolution error (#1826)
• First run asks about text size before the install, not after it (#1849)
• Cloning without a reference clip now says so, instead of naming library parameters you cannot set (#1879)
• Upgrading torch for an RTX 50-series card no longer trades one startup crash for another, and the upgrade is documented (#1931)
• A generation timeout now points at the compute-time budget in Settings rather than an environment variable (#1808)
• An engine you have not installed now says so, instead of reporting a failed check (#1866)
• The Accessibility prompt no longer floats over first-run setup and every other app until you grant it (#1845, #1886)
• The last onboarding step offers to install a speech-to-text model instead of failing three times when none is installed (#1856)
• A download that fails because the folder sits behind a mount point Windows will not cross now says so, and where to move it (#1957)
• A GPU that is merely short on free memory is no longer told to reinstall its drivers (#1812) — thanks michaelhuamanflores!
• An error thrown by a browser extension is filtered on Safari and the macOS app too, not only on Chromium (#1901) — thanks Chang-Jin-Lee!
• Choosing the China mirror no longer re-races the network on every dependency step, which cost seconds per step on blocked connections (#1892) — thanks yuezheng2006!
• The backend log panel reports a log it cannot read instead of quietly showing less (#1847) — thanks Chang-Jin-Lee!
• The floating dictation bubble adds pause, resume, stop, close, and a multiline preview (#1952)
• Transcriptions checks model readiness and offers an inline download and shortcut hints (#1952)
• Transcriptions' missing-model prompt lists every dictation model by accuracy vs latency, languages and size, so you install the one that fits — or switch to one already on disk (#1952)
• The Engines menu's Transcription tab picks the dictation model under Sherpa-ONNX, and that choice now also drives Sherpa transcription (#1952)
• A failure with no stage attached no longer borrows another stage's advice, so a text-to-speech error stops telling you the video server dropped the download (#1943)
• A generation failure that the app cannot classify now names the backend error class, so two unrelated faults stop arriving as the same untriageable report (#1800)
• Transcriptions dictation wakes the desktop recorder, presents one contextual start action, and centers its microphone icon with the label (#1902)
• Colab transcription and dubbing now include an explicit ASR model setup step (#1922) — thanks nidhi-singh02!
• Apple Silicon now shows one canonical OmniVoice choice in the engine picker while retaining its automatic crash-isolated sidecar runtime (#1913)
• Validate current-user Windows installers under a standard account on hosted runners (#1883)
• Model downloads survive a flaky connection instead of restarting from zero (#1940)
• bun run dev recovers on Windows instead of demanding Task Manager (#1941)
• The desktop app builds and opens from a fresh clone again (#1818) — thanks flutterkage2k!
• GPUs with less VRAM than the engine needs no longer get half the compute-time budget a CPU gets (#1806) — thanks VishvakR!
• Gallery voice previews play again — the quality guard was rejecting good renders as silent (#1819) — thanks flutterkage2k!
• Tilde-separated number ranges are spoken clearly without running their endpoints together (#1821) — thanks flutterkage2k!
• Voice modes use themed tabs, with Synthesize and Convert pinned below their scrolling forms (#1823)
• Fix current-user Windows installer validation and nested resource cleanup (#1873)
• Keep generated frontend assets available while building the current-user Windows installer (#1881)
• Voice cloning now starts with a clear upload-or-record choice, reveals recording and reference details only when needed, and keeps sampling controls under Production Overrides (#1817)
• The first-run welcome line uses an instruction accepted by OmniVoice and VoiceDesign engines (#1861) — thanks psiberfunk!
• audio.cpp joins the engine lineup as an opt-in CPU backend for Breeze-TTS-2 (English + Chinese, clone + voice design, explicit Model Catalogue install, no Python venv) (#1891)
• audio.cpp uses installed native CUDA, HIP, Metal, and Vulkan providers and preserves device routing across remote workers (#1926)
• Show estimated and measured model, dependency, cache, and temporary disk costs in the engine catalogue (#1718)
• Preview builds now stay newer than Stable even when automatic post-release version bumps are disabled (#1762)
• CosyVoice setup guidance now separates downloaded model files from the runtime that makes the engine available (#1761)
• MCP tools can now keep audio out of agent context by returning files and accepting base-path-confined file inputs (#1760) — thanks agudmund!
• Hear a dub line as you type it — an opt-in live preview streams TTS for the edited segment (#1769) — thanks mvanhorn!
• Studio gains a Convert method: re-say any clip in one of your saved voices, speech to speech, fully local (#1765) — thanks mvanhorn!
• Hardsub video export gains an opt-in karaoke word-highlight caption style (#1764) — thanks mvanhorn!
• The batch queue can now watch a folder: new videos dropped into it are dubbed automatically (#1768) — thanks mvanhorn!
• The audiobook player now shows the chapter text and highlights the word being narrated (#1766) — thanks mvanhorn!
• The dub editor gains a casting board: drag voice chips onto speakers, dropdowns stay in sync (#1767) — thanks mvanhorn!

Changed

• Tauri 2.11.5 with refreshed plugins (dialog, updater, log, opener, positioner, single-instance), React 19.3, TanStack Query 5.102, lucide 1.43, posthog-js 1.428, and the rest of the npm workspace on current minors; jsdom 30, jest-dom 7, concurrently 10, taze 21 (#1952)
• eslint ignores src-tauri/, so a local Tauri build no longer floods lint:hooks with parse errors from generated assets (#1952)
• Casting uses responsive SVG voice cards and searchable speaker menus that stay above surrounding panels (#1823)
• Dubbing aligns output settings, brings review status forward, and simplifies transcript and glossary editing; Launchpad files and voices reflow into responsive grids (#1823)
• Transcript segments use three readable rows for text, timing/status and voice controls, with heights that adapt to wrapping (#1823)
• Dragging the waveform pans horizontally while a click still seeks, keeping the timed transcript aligned (#1823)
• Bulk segment editing uses searchable voice and language menus, readable language names and a responsive selection toolbar (#1823)
• Dubbing overlays playback controls on video, combines waveform and transcript in a compact timeline, and removes header/action background fills (#1823)
• Dubbing uses compact casting, translation and output controls with responsive rows to leave more room for editing (#1823)
• Export uses grouped format settings, themed track menus and switches, with a pinned filename summary and download action (#1823)
• Dubbing output settings use icon-labelled switches, themed track and speaker menus, and clearer timing/transcript controls (#1823)
• Casting voice menus use searchable themed options with SVG preset icons instead of native dropdowns (#1823)
• Dubbing groups casting and translation controls with readable labels, SVG icons, searchable menus, and compact timeline spacing (#1823)
• Production Overrides use readable icon-labelled controls and accessible Denoise/Postprocess switches (#1823)
• Expanded navigation uses a theme-accent tint with subtle static wave gradients (#1823)
• Convert groups source audio, target voice, and timing options into clearer controls; design choices include theme-matched SVG icons (#1823)
• The expandable sidebar reveals workspace labels with restrained active states; language menus adapt to multiple columns on wider screens (#1823)
• Voice design and recording use themed, keyboard-accessible selectors with clearer spacing and labels (#1823)
• Voice tabs and upload/record controls have subtle SVG motion; Text adds clipboard paste and the upload area fills available height (#1823)
• The title-bar label cycles through active speech, transcription, and LLM engines; bundled model labels correctly say OmniVoice (#1823)
• The top-bar Engines panel groups Speech, Transcription, and LLM choices into tabs, with compact memory controls and no duplicate pickers (#1823)
• Voice Design simplified: the 12-row fine-grained block collapses to one summary line with a five-field...

Highlights

• OmniVoice generation on Apple Silicon now runs in a crash-isolated child, so fatal MPS memory exits no longer take down the local backend (#1697, #1698) — thanks ndntran14!
• Model-load GPU exhaustion now returns a sanitized, actionable dubbing error, and readiness correctly attributes the shared model status to TTS (#1695)
• Source-mode development now restarts an isolated backend crash without tearing down the UI, while repeated crash loops still stop loudly with diagnostics (#1690)
• Dubbing playback now keeps an audible companion source when a WebView can render the preview picture but cannot decode its audio (#1692)
• Model Catalogue engine rows now use the available desktop width and keep identity, runtime state, and actions from crowding one another (#1689)
• VoiceStudio now acts as a local speech platform: other apps can trigger its native dictation or connect through versioned HTTP, WebSocket, JSON-RPC, CLI, and MCP transports (#1646)
• A timed-out in-process dub transcription no longer starts a second WhisperX/CTranslate2 call over the abandoned native worker, preventing the overlapping access that preceded Windows 0xC0000005 exits (#1669)
• Windows debugger termination code 0x40010004 is no longer misreported as a backend crash or charged against automatic restart recovery (#1663)
• Studio now keeps one generation reservation across page changes, preventing a remount from stacking native jobs until the backend reports capacity busy or is killed under memory pressure (#1670)
• Uploaded dubbing videos are normalized to browser-safe H.264/AAC before preview, preventing valid VP9, AV1, or Opus media from failing with “no supported sources” (#1644)
• Dubbing now separates spoken and target languages, preserves translations through segment cleanup, and lets failed translations be retried or skipped without restarting the batch (#1654) — thanks Number16BusShelter!
• Importing replacement SRT subtitles now keeps each cue bound to the best-overlapping source speaker and clone instead of resetting every line to a random default voice (#1660) — thanks invio-a11y!
• Uploading a Dub preview no longer blocks every backend request while ffmpeg extracts its audio (#1667) — thanks tfreyd!
• Docker quick starts now require the administrator key needed through container NAT instead of starting a UI whose protected actions return 403 (#1651) — thanks wd357dui!
• WSL2 AMD containers now use the /dev/dxg ROCDXG bridge with actionable GPU diagnostics instead of silently falling back to CPU (#1655) — thanks wd357dui!
• Ad-hoc voice-clone references now stay alive until cancelled or timed-out GPU work actually stops reading them, so prompt caching can finish instead of failing on a deleted temp file (#1668) — thanks tfreyd!
• Dictation now stays bound to the app where it started and recovers locally from silent recognizer output (#1175)
• The backend now answers within a second of launch and narrates its startup step by step (#1550)
• Reporting a bug from an outdated build now offers the latest release first (#1547)
• The backend is only announced ready once it can actually serve, and crash-loop restarts now pace themselves (#1548)
• Invisible watermarking no longer stalls — or silently skips — the first take of a session (#1615)
• Dub subtitles can be retimed, inserted, and merged in either direction from the segment table (#1612) — thanks invio-a11y!

Changed

• Model Catalogue now uses one breathable workspace canvas with simpler pane and engine-family navigation instead of nested cards and scroll regions (#1685)
• Linux source launchers now catch missing libxdo and GStreamer audio plugins before they can cause a linker error or an aborted, blank WebKit renderer (#1680, #1682)
• Dictation now carries one native output session from shortcut-down through final delivery, restores text, HTML, image, or file-list clipboards only when untouched, keeps Wayland copy-safe unless current-focus insertion is explicitly enabled, and retries silent Sherpa speech only through an already-installed local ASR model (#1175)
• The backend binds its port immediately and reports startup progress live — /health answers 503-with-step and a new /startup/progress endpoint lists every step while PyTorch, API routes, and database migrations load in the background, so "starting at step X" is never mistakable for "dead"; the desktop splash narrates each step (#1550)

Added

• A bundled Rust loopback sidecar exposes dictation start/stop/toggle, focused-output sessions, discovery, and JSON-RPC; the backend adds versioned streaming events and a dependency-free CLI bridge for Herdr, coding agents, editors, desktop apps, and TUIs (#1646)
• Headless NVIDIA and ROCm machines can now join as worker-only Docker Compose services with no published UI and durable protocol-v2 enrollment; update both machines together before reconnecting (#1638) — thanks jkrogers9862!
• Linux ARM64 (Asahi Apple Silicon) support for the OmniVoice GGUF engine — a linux-aarch64 binary built with GGML Vulkan where the toolchain allows it, so Apple GPUs accelerate generation through the open-source Honeykrisp driver instead of falling back to CPU-only (#1641)
• One-command install on every desktop OS: curl -fsSL https://voicestudio.sh/install | sh (macOS/Linux/WSL) or irm https://voicestudio.sh/install | iex (Windows) — the URL serves the right script per platform, and Windows gains a source installer (scripts/install.ps1) with a 3-OS CI smoke (#1626)
• Per-line subtitle management in the dub table: a line's end time is editable alongside its start (typing a time and dragging its timeline edge now take the same path), lines merge with the previous row as well as the next (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+M), and a new line can be inserted into the gap after any row (#1612) — thanks invio-a11y!
• CI now enforces performance regression budgets on the hot paths — operation-count tests pin streaming TTS to one synthesis per sentence and cached dub re-mixes to zero re-synthesis; fast-path guards cover zero re-decoding and ⌈N/W⌉ native batch calls when enabled (#1594)
• Default-engine dubbing now synthesizes several segments per forward pass instead of one call per line — the width follows the host's device headroom (1 on CPU and low-VRAM cards, up to 8), OMNIVOICE_DUB_BATCH_WIDTH overrides it, and engines without native batching keep the single-segment path (#1594)
• /ws/tts now reports real time-to-first-audio, and its RTF measures synthesis alone so a slow client can't inflate it (#1594)
• The locally cached AudioSeal watermark generator warms on a background thread ~35s after boot (OMNIVOICE_PRELOAD_WATERMARK=0 opts out; explicitly setting =1 may download it), so the first synthesis no longer serializes the audioseal import + model load inline — measured at ~42s on a cold filesystem, 3s short of a 90s client timeout (#1576) — thanks paoloantinori!
• Voices you've cloned stay "warm" across restarts — encoded references now persist to disk (~10 KB each), so the first generation of a session skips the re-encode and any transcription pass; OMNIVOICE_PROMPT_DISK_CACHE=0 opts out (#1565)
• Optional FlashInfer acceleration for the default engine on CUDA (OMNIVOICE_FLASHINFER=1, ~2.2x measured) — needs the optional flashinfer-python package; missing package or kernel failure logs why and falls back to the standard path (#1565)
• The bug reporter notices when you're on an outdated build and offers the latest release before filing — with a "File anyway" escape hatch — and stamps a Build status line into every report so up-to-date reports are tellable from stale ones (#1547)
• Settings → Performance & Device gains a compute-device override (Auto / CUDA / ROCm / XPU / MPS / CPU, or OMNIVOICE_DEVICE) — pin the device when auto-detect picks wrong; only devices your machine actually has are offered (#1557)
• Opt-in 24-layer PocketTTS checkpoints via OMNIVOICE_POCKETTTS_24L — better prosody for it/de/es/pt at roughly 2x render time (still faster than real-time); the fast 6-layer model stays the default (#1613) — thanks paoloantinori!

Docs

• Supported-version and install guidance now identifies 0.5.1 as the stable desktop and container release (#1687)
• The Docker Hub overview now shows the current engine-switching demo, Model Catalogue, and gallery voice workflow (#1593)
• The Docker Hub overview and install guide now show the v0.5 tags and the built-in API-key/share-PIN security model instead of obsolete v0.4 and no-authentication guidance (#1592)
• The READMEs now lead with download buttons and a three-step first-clone walkthrough, and a new benchmarks page anchors measured per-engine/per-device numbers on the in-repo harness (#1555)
• Every engine now has its own guide — 21 new pages under docs/engines plus an index covering all 16 TTS and 11 ASR engines, linked from both READMEs (#1556)
• The OmniVoice guide now covers combining style attributes with a reference clip (consistent instruct stabilizes cloning; the reference wins conflicts), inline pronunciation control (pinyin / CMU phonemes), and corrects the claim that the default engine can't do voice design — it can, from attributes (#1565)

Fixed

• Workspaces now measure their responsive width when the post-bootstrap shell actually mounts, so native UI scaling reflows Projects and History instead of crushing the Dubbing demo into unreadable columns (#1683)
• Dubbing keeps the source-language selector visible after a local file is chosen, so ASR can be pinned before transcription starts (#1678) — thanks Lonki-lomki-cloud!
• First-run media-engine downloads become available to TTS immediately without a restart, and missing media-process failures now point to repair controls (#1677) — thanks farhataligpt-dev!
• Source installs on AMD GPUs honour OMNIVOICE_TORCH_VARIANT=rocm: bun run desktop now swaps in the ROCm torch wheel after uv sync and launches the backend without re-syncing, inst...

Highlights

• The app is now VoiceStudio (previously OmniVoice-Studio) — one waveform-and-spark identity across the app, docs and installers. Your data folder, settings and Docker image paths stay put.
• Model Catalogue — engines and models in one workspace: every TTS, transcription and LLM engine with its device routing and install state, defaults picked there.
• Switch TTS, ASR and LLM engines from the status bar or any workspace — ready-only choices, memory status, environment-pin protection, Ctrl/Cmd+E. (#1530)
• Lend another machine's GPU with a join code and a QR scan — a Compute control in the status bar picks where jobs run, and several people can share one GPU box with revocable, certificate-pinned connections. (#1516, #1496)
• Server mode is locked down: admin actions require an API key (#1525), and the remote UI exchanges it for short-lived sessions that never sit in browser storage or WebSocket URLs (#1528) — thanks bultodepapas!
• A faster, cleaner Dub workspace for multilingual production, with a production command bar and per-language cards. (#1489)
• The demo audio and video the app always advertised now actually ship, rendered by VoiceStudio's own engine. (#1517)
• Dictation works on Wayland now — the portal shortcut actually fires (#1490, #1526) — and the recording pill is back on every desktop.
• The Launchpad wears the project's signal-field waveform artwork over a quieter, borderless layout. (#1533)
• The catalogue reads as headroom, not breakage: available engines sort first, uninstalled ones say what they need (#1531), and the LLM row names the provider that actually answers (#1538).
• Gallery voices can be saved as local profiles — audio lands in your profile store with validated, content-addressed references. (#1542)

The Model Catalogue	The Voice Gallery

Changed

• Gallery personas now preview through the local backend, retain their complete voice-design recipe, and open directly in Voice, Stories, or Audiobook. (#1542)
• Support amount choices now use every theme's shared card, accent and focus tokens. (#1530)
• Sponsoring, commercial licensing and getting in touch are one page now. They answered the same question between them and each used to live somewhere else, so they are three sections on a single scroll — the footer heart, the commercial-licence links and Contact all land on it, at the section you asked for. (#1522)
• Model Catalogue switches panes with tabs instead of a two-state toggle, and the Engine Compatibility Matrix's TTS / ASR / LLM switcher is now tabs too — arrow-key navigable, and each tab still shows the engine it would use. (#1522)
• Engines you can actually use sort to the top of the compatibility matrix, and an unavailable engine's name recedes instead of the whole row fading — the status badge and GPU chips that say why it is unavailable stay legible. (#1522)
• Remote workers reads as a device list: status dot, address, latency, a live task meter, resident models and last-seen per machine, with housekeeping actions revealed on hover and a three-step empty state. (#1516)
• The GPU picker and the new status-bar control paint their status dots and menu surfaces from themed tokens instead of fixed palette classes, so they stop showing Gruvbox colours on Midnight and Catppuccin. (#1516)
• Dictation shows the pill again: a capture puts a small always-on-top capsule near the bottom of the screen you are working on — listening, transcribing, the result, and any error — and takes it away when the session ends. It never takes focus, so the text still lands in the app you were typing into. On Wayland the compositor decides where it sits; everywhere else it is bottom-centred.
• Engines and models moved out of Settings into a new Model Catalogue workspace, reachable from the icon rail (or the title-bar tabs); Settings → Engines and Settings → Models now point there, and Settings keeps the models directory and Hugging Face mirror.
• The Settings sidebar is keyboard-navigable: ⌘K / Ctrl+K jumps to the filter, ↑/↓ and Home/End move between categories, and Enter or ↓ from the filter drops into the list. Matching text in a filtered category name is highlighted, and group headers stay pinned while the list scrolls.
• The Launchpad has a quieter, more spacious look: borderless feature tiles that light up on hover or keyboard focus, plain-numeral counts, hairline section rules, and one shared page column for the hero, tiles, recent files and project lists.
• Linux release smoke now validates linuxdeploy's wrapped custom launcher instead of rejecting a healthy AppImage. (#1506)
• Remote GPU workers render audiobooks chapter by chapter, with automatic per-chapter local fallback and one combined notice if the worker drops out. (#1478)
• Remote GPU workers can now run a job to completion: long renders no longer die at two minutes, a worker that drops and reconnects mid-render keeps its work, and a timed-out job no longer takes the worker offline for good. Placing a job still needs the development-only POST /workers/tasks; wiring the app's own Synthesize button to it comes next.
• Voice, Stories, Audiobook, Gallery, Settings, profiles, and Launchpad now use compact, responsive layouts with accessible controls. (#1491)
• Dubbing's Generate Dub, Verify, and Export actions now use a compact hierarchy with visible labels, responsive reflow, and motion-safe feedback. (#1493)
• The Dub workspace now has a compact production command bar, responsive flag-based language cards, media previews in Dub History, and a narrower Projects rail. (#1489)
• VoiceStudio now uses one waveform-and-spark mark across the title bar, About screen, README, browser favicon, and every desktop/platform icon. (#1487)
• PocketTTS now asks you to review its code license, model license and gated-access conditions before first use, and explains how to unlock the model instead of showing a raw download failure — thanks paoloantinori! (#1442)
• The repository moved to github.com/debpalash/VoiceStudio. Every link in the app, docs and scripts now points there; GitHub redirects the old URLs, and the Docker image paths, the app bundle identifier and your data folder are all deliberately unchanged. (#1394)
• The app is now VoiceStudio (previously OmniVoice-Studio). Only the name you see changes — your data folder, settings and the Docker image paths stay put, so upgrading needs nothing from you. On Linux the .deb is now voicestudio; remove the old omnivoice-studio package once.
• macOS floor raised to 13.3 (Ventura) — the frontend has required Safari 16.4 for some time, so macOS 12 was a promise the stack could not keep (#1268)
• The first-run setup screen no longer overpromises. It claimed "no account, no cloud, no telemetry" without qualification — untrue for anyone who opts into analytics — and now says what actually holds either way: your voices, recordings and projects never leave the machine, and no processing happens in the cloud.
• Dictation no longer shows a floating pill. The hotkey records, transcribes and pastes with nothing on screen; the tray icon still marks recording, and anything needing your attention (Accessibility, microphone, a failed transcription) now arrives as a notification in the main window.

Added

• Gallery personas preview through the local backend, keep their full voice-design recipe, and open directly in Voice, Stories, or Audiobook — and can be saved as local profiles with validated audio references. (#1542)
• The demo audio the app has always advertised now actually ships: previews for all seven voice-design presets, the three dictation replay clips, and the dubbing demo's source video plus four dubbed languages with subtitles. Every one of those was a dead link before — the tooling that renders them required macOS, so on Windows and Linux the files were never built. (#1517)
• Demo assets are rendered by VoiceStudio's own engine, so the tooling runs wherever the app does, and the demos are made by the thing they demonstrate. (#1517)
• A machine can now join a control plane from the app: Settings → System → Remote workers → Lend this machine's GPU, paste the join code, done — no environment variables and no restart. The address travels with the code, so the machine reconnects on its own afterwards. (#1516)
• Join codes and connection strings are shown as a QR code alongside the text, with a live expiry countdown — scan it from the other machine instead of retyping forty characters. (#1516)
• A Compute control in the status bar: pick local or a remote machine, turn remote workers on or off, and mint a join code without opening Settings. It appears only once you have opted in or enrolled a machine. (#1516)
• A worker waiting for approval can be approved from its row. The panel labelled that state before but offered no way out of it. (#1516)
• Model Catalogue — a workspace of its own for engines and models: browse every TTS, transcription and LLM engine with its device routing and install state, pick the default for each, and install or remove model weights, all from one screen instead of two Settings categories.
• Remote GPU machines can now accept connections instead of dialling out, so several people can use the same box at once — each gets their own revocable connection string, with certificate-pinned TLS, a live list of who is connected, and a disconnect button. (#1496)
• Remote GPU model downloads now use the normal Models insta...

Highlights

• The update prompt is a small toast with buttons, not a screenful of release notes
• Installing an update no longer throws away work that is still running
• Quitting the app mid-generate stops reporting itself as a crash
• A half-downloaded model repairs itself instead of dead-ending
• "Dismiss" no longer reads as "terminate an employee" in five languages

Changed

• An available update now announces itself as a toast with Install and restart, What's new and Later, instead of only a dot beside the version number. The release notes stay in Settings → Updates, where there is room for them — a version's notes are the whole changelog section, and rendering them inline is what made the old prompt fill the screen (#1272)

Fixed

• Installing an update no longer relaunches the app while work is running. The check only knew about dub synthesis, so a restart could silently discard an upload, a transcription, a translation, an export or a standalone synth — and two overlapping synths used to cancel each other's protection. Install is now greyed out while anything is in flight (#1272)
• A half-downloaded model now repairs itself instead of failing with a raw 500. The automatic repair recognised only one of the two ways the loader reports missing weights, so an interrupted download whose subfolder failed to load got neither the repair nor a hint about what to do (#1273)
• Quitting the app with a generate queued reported "500 Internal Server Error: model load skipped: backend shutting down" and offered to file a bug for it. A shutdown is not a fault: the backend now answers 503 with what to do, and no bug report is offered for it (#1276)
• Dub history: clearing a large history while a render was running could still resurrect the deleted job — which markers survived depended on the process hash seed, and an oversized purge could discard a live one (#1252)
• German, Japanese, Russian and both Chinese locales rendered "Dismiss" as the employment sense — "terminate an employee" — on close buttons (#1272)
• The "wait for the current job to finish" message named dubbing specifically, though it now covers uploads, transcription, translation, exports and synthesis; reworded across all 21 languages (#1272)

Linux x64 artifacts

81c1265984ec4376aecd28417413b037cdef3b1b9fe6bc7cb8d731cad7811f60  OmniVoice Studio_0.4.2_amd64.AppImage
4e880f64a85333b9c54a1a15990e54b02355667faf609e0b82160e75d88d8906  OmniVoice Studio_0.4.2_amd64.AppImage.sig

macOS Intel artifacts

22f0212893ee2b0b373329b730520fad943bd5685d1a6219a4b4b53b1e8ef949  OmniVoice Studio_0.4.2_x64.dmg
7e1ebf185e456fe89a5fbee3603f1992604cf9c672717fe7d63a0fa64d2d14e1  OmniVoice Studio.app.tar.gz
e2d5cc678b4ed3ee637e37a48d6e109babe6d0311d041dc867e3bc85493b160a  OmniVoice Studio.app.tar.gz.sig

Windows x64 artifacts

6cd5b924fa1e6ec2022ff3db0c18bec24e765fb71a294f9101fac807d4a132a1 *OmniVoice Studio_0.4.2_x64_en-US.msi
1ebddf5fcd019345085763f127a6be20b6d3cff0b241a2095e1aafd987b4d369 *OmniVoice Studio_0.4.2_x64_en-US.msi.sig

Contributors

Thank you all 💜

Highlights

• AMD GPUs are used again — every ROCm host was silently running on the CPU
• Two synth failures that used to say "an error OmniVoice doesn't recognize" now say what actually went wrong
• A dub URL ingest that fails on a disk problem now says which folder and why
• A broken audio dependency no longer takes the whole backend down at startup
• A GPU too small for the chosen engine now says so up front, not after a five-minute wait
• A port conflict now says so, instead of "Backend died (exit code 1)"
• A model download that dies at 90% now resumes instead of failing the install
• First run: Continue and the Hugging Face token box no longer sit under the status bar
• macOS 12 (Monterey): the app launches again instead of dying on startup
• Exporting a voice or a dub no longer fails when the name isn't spelled in Latin letters
• Two more failures that used to arrive as raw OS text now say what to do about them
• Unload works on every model the panel offers it for, and a language the active engine can't speak says so
• Deleting a dub no longer un-deletes itself when the job it belonged to finishes

Changed

• First run: the status bar (Logs, version, Sponsors) appears once you reach the studio, instead of overlaying the setup steps (#1241)

Added

• OMNIVOICE_MCP_ALLOWED_HOSTS — comma-separated host patterns (e.g. host.containers.internal:*,192.168.1.5:*) that extend the MCP SDK's DNS-rebinding allowlist, so AI agents running in Docker containers or on other machines can reach the /mcp endpoint. The SDK default is localhost-only; this env var is opt-in (#1249)

Docs

• Docker: ROCm section explains that torch.cuda.is_available() == True isn't proof the app is on the GPU, and notes the --group-add needed for /dev/kfd on rootless hosts (#1228)

Fixed

• Deleting a dub while it was still importing crashed the import with the toast ingest: 'mgw39lx3' — a dict key and nothing else — and the delete could then be undone by the job's own pending write, in history or mid-render; both are fixed, and no failure can present itself as a bare value again — thanks dustmaker124-ui! (#1252, #1253)
• macOS 12 (Monterey): the app threw on startup and never started the backend — it called a Safari 16 method on the WebView that macOS ships. It launches and works now; some styling still needs a newer WebView (tracked in #1268) — thanks singhrahat! (#1245)
• Settings → Engines: Unload failed with 400 Unknown model id: engine:kittentts on any in-process engine — the panel offered the button for ids the backend never accepted; the warm dictation model had the same gap — thanks JavaxmI! (#1247)
• Picking a language the active engine can't speak recited 23 codes without saying which engine refused or that switching engine was the fix — thanks pulananave! (#1257)
• A YouTube import that failed as "DRM protected" and then worked on a manual retry now escalates the player client automatically, and a genuinely undownloadable video says so — thanks gysahlgreene! (#1254)
• Exporting a voice profile, persona, dub, subtitle or stem whose name is Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew or emoji failed with a 'latin-1' codec 500 — every download endpoint now sends the name correctly, and browsers get the real one back — thanks zvxzdx! (#1262)
• A synth that failed because ffmpeg/ffprobe wasn't on the system path said "an error OmniVoice doesn't recognize"; it now names the media engine and points at Settings → Audio tools, and the app's own copy is published on PATH so dependencies find it in the first place — thanks Heuvelsma! (#1256)
• Windows "The paging file is too small" arrived as a bare 500; it now explains that this is a virtual-memory setting, not full RAM, and gives the steps to raise it — thanks trankeny545-sudo! (#1251)
• AMD/ROCm: every ROCm host was silently force-routed to the CPU — the compatibility gate compared a CUDA sm_ tag against a ROCm build's gfx list, which can never match — thanks simmessa! (#1228)
• AMD/ROCm: torch.compile was disabled on all AMD hosts by the same mismatched comparison (#1228)
• AMD/ROCm: HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION is auto-set only when your card genuinely needs it and the remap target exists in your build; gfx1150/gfx1151 (Strix Point/Halo) added to the map (#1228)
• Windows blocking an engine file (Smart App Control, WDAC, or AppLocker) is now named, with the fix for personal and managed PCs — thanks AdityaHemantBhat! (#1227)
• A failed audio write (LibsndfileError: System error.) now names the target file, its folder's writability and the drive's free space — thanks morozov28061995-boop! (#1221)
• Dub URL ingest: a disk error now names the job folder, its writability and the drive's free space, instead of pointing at the system TEMP folder it never used — thanks dustmaker124-ui! (#1225)
• Dub URL ingest fails immediately when the job folder is missing or unwritable, instead of starting a download that can only fail (#1225)
• The backend no longer dies at startup when transformers can't resolve its audio tokenizer (a missing or mismatched torchaudio, common on Google Colab) — it starts, and the error arrives with a repair hint — thanks Navdeep-Chauhan-777! (#1229)
• Importing omnivoice.utils.* no longer drags in torch, torchaudio, transformers and the full model definition — thanks Navdeep-Chauhan-777! (#1229)
• Colab notebook: the install cell now catches a broken environment with the real error, instead of a 5-minute health timeout two cells later — thanks Navdeep-Chauhan-777! (#1229)
• A GPU with less VRAM than the chosen engine needs is flagged in Settings → Engines before you generate, instead of showing a clean green "accelerated" until the job times out — thanks AdityaHemantBhat and @beingavais! (#1226, #1222)
• A generation timeout now names your actual card and its VRAM and recommends a lighter engine (#1226, #1222)
• First run: Continue and the Hugging Face token box rendered underneath the status bar, off the bottom of the window — the wizard laid itself out against the viewport instead of its own frame (#1241)
• A busy port 3900 now reports a port conflict instead of "Backend died (exit code 1)", in every language — thanks xipb14! (#1223)
• The app verifies it actually freed the port before starting the backend, rather than assuming the kill worked (#1223)
• A model download truncated near the end is now retried and resumed instead of aborting the whole install — thanks Reaksa-Cambodia! (#1224)
• Engine first-use downloads (VoxCPM2, MOSS-TTS-Nano) retry transient network failures instead of failing the load outright (#1224)
• A backend killed by the OS mid-stream now leaves a low-memory trail in the crash report (#1224)

macOS Apple Silicon artifacts

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be702e7f03913da7a4ff4bb0049dc2dd225d3c5602d959a6dcbcce7330c75049  OmniVoice Studio.app.tar.gz
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Windows x64 artifacts

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011c4c8e9c58bf2de3b06a3a76df26718b5c6f0ecb168bd3d495c3b334952e96 *OmniVoice Studio_0.4.1_x64_en-US.msi.sig

macOS Intel artifacts

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84a8b1ac1da95ecdfb1c0be08cb5a4e57ca5cead3e0a14a416caf50e15aec6d7  OmniVoice Studio.app.tar.gz
82e6bb094852c15ebfae54f45c22ac4185d36bd398cf52ac3e1e1c73cf0b26ca  OmniVoice Studio.app.tar.gz.sig

Contributors

Thank you all 💜

Highlights

• Audiobooks, end to end — a real Stop with live per-chapter progress, a multi-voice cast, expressive controls, a markup toolbar, live stats, and a one-click sample
• Pick a designed voice from the Gallery anywhere you choose a voice — audiobook, Stories, and Dubbing
• Dub Paste Translation — drop in a translation or .srt and it maps straight onto your segments, timings intact
• Downloading a finished audiobook no longer hijacks the app — it just saves
• First run is ~2.4 GB, not ~5 GB — only the TTS model is required; ASR picks are curated per platform
• Guided mic + Accessibility permissions with Open Settings deep-links; Parakeet TDT v3 on Apple Silicon
• Opens in your system language, with a one-tap switch back to English
• Security: server-mode admin routes can't be reached by a trusted-network client without the API key
• A render error shows a recoverable card instead of a blank window; queued and long generations stop failing with a bogus "too heavy for your hardware"

Changed

• Settings → Models: grouped catalog (TTS / ASR / Dictation / Diarisation), "recommended for this machine" chips, incompatible models collapsed behind a toggle
• Only the TTS model (~2.4 GB) is required on first run; ASR picks are curated per platform via curated_on in models.yaml (MLX on Apple Silicon, CT2+Turbo on CUDA, PyTorch on ROCm, int8 on CPU)
• Audiobook tab tidied up: the settings column is now grouped into compact collapsible sections (Output / Book details / Pronunciation / Markup), so script + voice + Create sit up top instead of a long scroll — same controls, denser layout (#1214)

Removed

• The Dubbing per-segment picker's hardcoded design-presets group — superseded by the richer designed-voice Gallery; already-saved preset: picks still generate identically (#1220)

Added

• Voice picker: the designed-voice Gallery is now selectable anywhere a voice is chosen — the audiobook default voice and each Cast row can pick a gallery archetype (searchable, favourites first), and it's materialised into a real profile on pick so it just works everywhere (#1219)
• The Stories editor and the Dubbing per-segment voice pickers now use the same gallery-enabled picker, so designed-voice archetypes are selectable there too; the dub picker drops its redundant hardcoded presets group in favour of the richer Gallery (existing picks unchanged) (#1220)
• Audiobook tab: a Cast panel maps each [voice:NAME] in the script to a profile so multi-voice renders correctly (it previously fell back to a single voice), plus a markup insert toolbar, live stats (chapters · words · est. runtime), and pre-flight validation for unknown voices and empty chapters (#1217)
• Audiobook tab: a Stop button that truly cancels a running generation (not just the UI) and live per-chapter progress — a bar, elapsed + ETA, and each chapter's status (rendering / done / cached / failed); finished chapters stay cached so Create again resumes. Cmd/Ctrl+Enter starts a render (#1216)
• Settings → Permissions + wizard System Check: live mic/Accessibility grant state, per-OS guidance, Open Settings deep-links; dictation pre-flights the mic grant (#1175)
• parakeet-mlx engine: Parakeet TDT v3 on Apple Silicon — 25 EU languages, word timestamps, ~2 GB, opt-in from Settings → Models, never auto-downloads (#1175)
• First-run downloads race the direct GitHub path against the mirror and use whichever answers fastest (#1179)
• First-run consent question for the existing opt-in analytics (two equal buttons, skip = no)
• First run: when the app auto-opens in a non-English system language, a one-time, dismissible banner offers to switch the UI to English — shown only until you pick a language, never for English systems (#1215)
• Source builds carry the publishable analytics token and get the same first-run consent ask as installers; opt-in events now note the install channel (installer / docker / source) — thanks agudmund! (#1193)
• Official Google Colab notebook (notebooks/OmniVoice_Studio_Colab.ipynb) — full app + API feature tour on a free T4
• ROCm Docker image ghcr.io/debpalash/omnivoice-studio:rocm (+ :stable-rocm, :X.Y.Z-rocm) (#1165)
• OMNIVOICE_TRUSTED_NETWORKS — comma-separated CIDRs exempted from the consumption auth gates (share PIN / API key / dictation WS); admin routes stay loopback-only (#1170)
• Info/warn system notifications are dismissible and stay dismissed across restarts; error-level notices can't be dismissed, and the unclean-shutdown notice is now acknowledged server-side — thanks agudmund! (#1192)
• clone_voice MCP tool — AI agents can clone a new voice from a base64 reference audio sample; returns a profile_id immediately usable with generate_speech — thanks paoloantinori! (#1194)
• Dub tab: Paste Translation — paste a translation made elsewhere (ChatGPT, DeepL, a human) as subtitles, numbered lines, or plain lines; it maps onto the existing segments with a before→after preview, keeping timings and the source transcript intact (#1203)
• Audiobook tab: Production Overrides (position/class temperature, steps, guidance, postprocess, seed) for expressive narration, plus IndexTTS2 emotion controls and a "vary repeated lines" toggle — defaults reproduce today's renders exactly (#1208)
• Audiobook tab: a Load sample button that fills the editor with a demo story — chapters, per-character [voice:], [pause], [slow]/[fast]/[emphasis]/[spell], and reaction tags — so first-timers can hit Create and hear every capability before their real work (#1214)

CI

• The quiet changelog style and 21-locale key/placeholder parity are now enforced by plain pytest checks; CodeRabbit/Greptile carry the house rules via .coderabbit.yaml/greptile.json (#1198)

Docs

• docs/expressive-speech.md: per-engine breaths/laughter/emotion control, incl. the default engine's 13 native reaction tags
• Flush caches / Unload documented in the performance guide, incl. POST /system/flush-memory for scripts
• README FAQ: why a longer reference clip doesn't clone better (zero-shot 15 s cap; fine-tuning is the audiobook-grade path)
• docs/expressive-speech.md corrected so every recipe it names (breaths, temperature) is reachable in the surface it points to, including the Audiobook tab (#1208)
• New docs/api-auth.md — one place for authenticating the local API: share PIN, API key, dictation WebSocket, and trusted networks, with curl/SDK examples and what 401/403/429 mean (#1212)

Fixed

• Downloading a finished audiobook (or story mix) no longer hijacks the app: in the desktop WebView a plain download link to the media file made WebKit navigate the whole window to it and play it fullscreen (then the blank-window guard misfired) — downloads now go through the native Save dialog + a server-side copy instead (#1218)
• The blank-window guard's fallback page is shown by injection rather than a data: URL the desktop WebViews refuse to navigate to, and its Reload button now returns to the app even if the window had navigated away (#1218)
• Security (server mode): the admin routes (/system/*, /api/settings/* — RCE-class) now require the API key or genuine loopback — with an API key set and OMNIVOICE_TRUSTED_NETWORKS configured, a trusted-network client could previously reach them with no credential; the short share PIN no longer gates admin either (#1213)
• A render error no longer blanks the whole window — a recoverable error card (Reload / Report) appears instead, and CI now builds the real production bundle so a pre-mount crash can't ship (#1209)
• Voice-clone trimmer: the preview now plays exactly the selected region on variable-bitrate clips (it had drifted off on VBR/mis-reported-duration files by playing the original file on a different timeline) (#1210)
• Screen readers now announce the hidden file-picker buttons (batch add, gallery import, stories import) (#1211)
• Audiobook language selection now reaches the backend — the client had dropped the language field, and the tab's Markup reference now lists the reaction tags ([laughter], [sigh], …) that already work there (#1208)
• A backend that fails to start now says why — exit code and error output, with actionable hints and a one-click report — instead of the evidence-free "Can't reach the local OmniVoice backend" (#1177)
• Generation no longer crawls on CPU after a cancelled or failed dub: the TTS model is moved back to the GPU on every exit path, and each generation now verifies its own placement (#1191)
• A generation queued behind a busy one no longer spends its timeout waiting: the budget starts when a GPU worker picks the job up, so a queued request can't be failed as "too heavy for the available compute" without having run (#1190)
• One request's timeout no longer cancels unrelated jobs already waiting in the GPU queue (#1190)
• Timeout messages stopped claiming capacity was restored automatically — the abandoned job keeps the device until it finishes, and the guidance now says to let it drain (#1190)
• The length-scaled generate budget now covers every path — streaming previews, batch dubbing, /v1/audio/speech, dub and archetype previews — instead of only the two classic call sites, so long inputs stop failing at a flat 300s (#1190)
• Provenance watermarking moved off the GPU worker pool: on 1-worker machines each embed was serializing ahead of the next generation (#1190)
• A batch segment that times out fails the job with a reason instead of shipping a finished-looking dub with silent gaps (#1190)
• /v1/audio/speech refuses work up front with 429 + Retry-After when the pool is saturated, and returns a retryable 503 rather than a 500 on timeout (#1190)
• Subtitle parsing no longer stalls on a blank-line-heavy .srt: the timing-line regex backtracked across newlines, so a mis-saved export could pin an import for hours (#1203)
• A broken ASR engine's fallback could silently auto-download...

The dubbing release. Dubbed videos stop sounding like a compromise: the music keeps its stereo width and full frequency range, short lines no longer leave dead air while the mouth keeps moving, one speaker stays one voice, and the language tabs finally switch the transcript with the audio. Underneath it, the memory fixes that ended the "can't reach the local backend" era on 16 GB machines ship at last — plus a sweep of never-again hardening drawn from an audit of every bug this project has ever closed.

Added

• A "Voice match" toggle for dubbing — keep one steady voice per speaker. Each dubbed line clones from a snippet of its own original audio, which matches the delivery beautifully but can make the voice itself drift from line to line — most audibly on videos where speaker detection ran in fallback mode ("still 4 segments different in voice", as one report put it). A new control next to the Timing picker chooses: Per line (the default, unchanged) for the best per-line delivery match, or Consistent to clone every line of a speaker from one shared reference — the speaker's pooled sample, or the best single clip when none exists — for a steady identity across the whole dub. Flipping it honestly marks segments as needing regeneration, and the shared reference is encoded once and reused, not re-studied per line. (#1147)

• A performance guide, at last. docs/performance.md explains where generation and dubbing time actually goes, the three classic causes of "it got slow" (an empty Transcript field on a voice profile chief among them), every tuning knob the backend reads — none of which were documented anywhere — and which settings to leave alone (raising OMNIVOICE_GPU_WORKERS on a small GPU is how you get the crash the default exists to prevent). Includes how to run the built-in profiler so a slowness report can carry numbers instead of vibes.

• In-app analytics is now wired end to end — and still off until you say yes. The frontend analytics SDK is only ever started after you opt in (Settings → Privacy), never at app launch, so a default install still transmits nothing. Two of the SDK's defaults are explicitly disabled because they would be actively harmful here: autocapture, which sends the text content of whatever you click — in this app, the script you are about to synthesise, your voice names, your file names — and session recording, which records the screen. Events carry metadata only, filtered through the same allowlist as the backend, so no future change can leak your content by adding a field.

• Opt-in analytics — off by default, and it can't lie to you. OmniVoice still sends nothing out of the box: no accounts, no telemetry, no phone-home, and your text, audio, voices, and projects never leave your machine regardless of what you choose. There is now one toggle in Settings → Privacy → "Help improve OmniVoice", off unless you turn it on. If you do, it sends anonymous usage stats — which engine and language you used, how long a generation took, how many characters the text had (a number, not the text), and the type of any error. It never sends the text you type, your audio, your file names, your voice names, or anything identifying you. That isn't a promise in a policy: an allowlist in the code drops any property that isn't on it, so a future change can't leak content by accident, and crash tracebacks are deliberately not auto-captured (they can carry file paths and tokens). Turning it off stops everything immediately. Builds from source have no analytics destination at all and don't even show the toggle.

• Settings → Usage: see what you've made, counted entirely on your own machine. Takes generated, audio produced, voices, days used, and a breakdown by mode and language — all computed from the history already in your own database. It collects nothing new, stores nothing new, and transmits nothing anywhere, no matter what you've chosen under Settings → Privacy: this panel is yours, it works with analytics switched off, and it never phones home. If you want to know what you've been making, the answer shouldn't require sending it to anyone.

• The memory panel now tells the whole truth. Settings → Models (and GET /model/loaded) used to report only the OmniVoice core model — a resident second engine like MLX-Audio, or the warm dictation model, was invisible, so the memory picture looked ~2 GB lighter than reality. It now lists every resident model (in-process engines and the dictation ASR included) and adds a system block with free/total RAM (and free VRAM on a dedicated GPU) plus a low-memory warning. On top of that, a load that starts while memory is already low leaves a breadcrumb in the backend log, so a subsequent out-of-memory kill points at the load that tipped it instead of dying silently. Advisory only — nothing is blocked (the OS can reclaim memory, and refusing a load on an estimate would brick machines that would actually cope). Tune the threshold with OMNIVOICE_LOW_MEMORY_HEADROOM_GB (default 2).

Fixed

• Switching preview languages can't leave a mixed-language transcript. Follow-up to the tab/transcript sync: if a track's translations were only partially stored in the browser (older projects, partial regenerations), switching tabs could show German audio with a few rows still in the previous language. Missing rows now hydrate from the app's own per-language store on the backend — and a picked regional dialect is automatically cleared when you switch to a language it doesn't belong to, wherever the switch comes from. (#1149)

• The Export step's language tabs now switch the transcript too. Clicking Bengali/German/Hindi… above the finished dub swapped the video but left the segment list showing whichever language you generated last — German audio over Bengali text. The tabs now also swap every segment's text to that language (through the same per-language store the language picker uses, so nothing is lost when you switch back); the Original tab keeps your editing language as-is, since each row already shows the original line beneath its translation. (#1148)

• A "backend crashed" notice can no longer outlive the update that fixed the crash — and the desktop shell's self-repair paths are now pinned by tests that CI actually runs. Crash notices now record which app version wrote them, and a notice left behind by an older version is ignored and cleaned up after you upgrade instead of resurfacing as if the new build had crashed. The Windows blank-window repair (the one-click WebView cache fix after a BSOD) also gets regression tests pinning its safety contract — one attempt per request, never touches anything unasked, never blocks startup on a locked cache — and CI now runs the desktop shell's entire Rust unit-test suite on macOS, Windows, and Linux, which it previously never executed at all. (#1145)

• The MLX-Audio phonemizer's language model now ships with the app environment instead of being fetched mid-generation. Follow-up to the pip fix: with the installer present, the first English MLX-Audio generation would auto-download a small model straight from GitHub — an outbound request that bypasses the app's mirror system (a problem on restricted networks) and fails offline. The model is now a pinned dependency of the managed environment: it arrives at install/update time through the normal dependency flow, and first generation works fully offline. (#1146)

• The MLX-Audio engine's first English generation no longer trips over a missing installer. Its phonemizer auto-downloads a small language model on first use by shelling out to pip — which the app's managed Python environment didn't include, so the download always failed (and before the recent containment fix, took the whole backend down with it, #1133). pip now ships as a real dependency of the managed environment, so it survives app updates too — anything installed ad-hoc would have been stripped by the updater's environment sync, quietly re-breaking this after every release. (#1144)

• A voice engine's helper library can no longer shut down the whole backend. One user's backend died 21 seconds after starting (#1133): the MLX-Audio engine's phonemizer tries to auto-download a language model on first use, the downloader is written as a command-line tool, and on failure it calls "exit the program" — which, running inside the backend, exited the backend. Any engine dependency written that way could do this. Exits are now contained at the engine-dispatch boundary and turned into a normal, explained error ("an engine dependency failed to auto-install something — see the log"), for TTS and transcription alike. The app keeps running; the failed request tells you what actually happened. (#1143)

• Vietnamese years read like Vietnamese again. A recent release started spelling out numbers before synthesis, and its Vietnamese number library turns out to be wrong for exactly the numbers people say most — years ("2024" became "hai nghìn lẻ hai mươi bốn", which no Vietnamese speaker says). The voice model has always pronounced Vietnamese digits correctly on its own, so Vietnamese text now keeps its digits — the same conservative rule that already protected Vietnamese decimals. Also closes the loophole that made this depend on spelling: picking "Vietnamese" from the language list behaved differently from the code "vi". (#1139)

• A voice profile's pinned seed now pins Audiobook renders too. Locking a take (or a designed voice) stores a seed so the voice performs reproducibly — and the Voice page honors it, but Audiobook/Stories renders quietly ignored it and rolled fresh randomness for every segment. Book renders with a pinned-seed profile are now deterministic end to end, matching the Voice page. And the audiobook renderer's higher generation quality (32 decoding steps — the model's own quality preset,...

The memory release. The reason the app kept saying "Can't reach the local backend" on 16 GB machines was never really the network — the backend was quietly running out of memory and getting killed. This release fixes that at the source: the models it holds now get out of each other's way. Plus the uninstaller and factory reset grew into a proper Settings → Storage pair.

Added

• Factory reset grew up: Settings → Storage → "Reset & remove". It used to do exactly one thing — clear your UI preferences — while the only other option was deleting everything and starting over. Between "forget my theme" and "wipe the machine" sat every reset people actually needed. Now there are four one-click tiers — UI preferences, all settings, downloaded assets & models, and everything OmniVoice did — plus a per-item checklist if you want to drop just the model weights, just a wedged sidecar engine, or just the history. Every option shows its real size on disk before you commit, and the number on the button is exactly what gets freed. Deleting voices, projects or audio asks you to type DELETE; nothing irreversible happens on a single click. "Everything" deliberately stops short of the Python environment, so you land on a working first-run screen rather than a rebuild — the app stops its engine, deletes, and starts it again for you. On macOS and Linux the model cache is the shared Hugging Face cache, so it's its own checkbox and says so; on Windows and portable installs it's OmniVoice's own, and the app doesn't pretend otherwise.

• The Storage panels got a design. "Remove all data" and "Reset & remove" listed folders as a flat run of text, so a 7.5 GB model cache and a 391-byte config file carried exactly the same visual weight — the one thing you actually wanted to see (where the space went) was the one thing you couldn't. Every row now has an icon, a dimmed path, and a proportional bar showing its share of what will be freed, so the big one looks big. The shared Hugging Face cache is promoted out of the confirm dialog into its own "Optional" row with a checkbox, so ticking it moves the running total in front of you instead of springing a different number on you at the point of no return, and the dialog now lists exactly what is about to go.

Fixed

• Switching TTS engines no longer stacks their models in memory. Using a second engine in a session (or a per-request engine override) loaded its model on top of the first one's, because the OmniVoice core model and the other engines live in two separate caches that never coordinated — measured on a 16 GB M2, an omnivoice → mlx-audio switch left the machine holding both (footprint 3.9 GB → 4.3 GB, the ~2.8 GB core never freed). That accumulation is a direct contributor to the memory pressure behind the "Can't reach the local backend" OOM deaths. Now only one TTS engine's model stays resident: resolving an engine hands back every other resident engine first (the same omnivoice → mlx-audio switch now drops to ~1.5 GB). Steady-state single-engine use is unaffected; an A/B switch pays a re-load on the way back (~8 s for the OmniVoice core, ~1–2 s for the lighter engines). Opt out with OMNIVOICE_SINGLE_ENGINE_RESIDENT=0 if you have RAM to keep several warm. Two underlying leaks are fixed as part of this: every in-process TTS engine's unload() now actually frees its model and empties the device cache (previously all but OmniVoice were silent no-ops), and faster-whisper's unload() cleared the wrong attribute so its model was never released.

• The backend no longer sits on ~2 GB of idle dictation model — the real reason it was being killed on 16 GB Macs. Four reports of "Can't reach the local OmniVoice backend" (#1076, #1092, #1093, #1101) all died at the same moment: during a generate, on a 16 GB machine. Measuring it showed the generate was never the problem — it costs about 116 MB. The problem was the baseline: the backend sat at ~6.2 GB even while idle. The TTS model has always been unloaded after an idle timeout, but the speech-recognition model used for dictation never was — so once you dictated a single time, ~2 GB stayed resident for as long as the app ran. On a 16 GB Mac, that plus the app, macOS, and your other programs is enough for the system to run out of memory and kill the backend, which surfaced as the "can't reach the backend" error. Dictation's model now gets the same idle release the TTS model already had, handing that memory back. The only cost is a ~1.4-second re-warm on your next dictation after a long pause, and a live dictation session is pinned so nothing is ever unloaded mid-sentence.

• Folder sizes under 1 KB displayed as "0 KB". The uninstall panel's 391 B config folder rendered as 0 KB — which reads as "nothing here" for a folder that very much exists. The Storage panels now share one byte formatter that can say 391 B.

• Some styling silently did nothing. A handful of components referenced CSS custom properties that were never defined (--chrome-fg-subtle, --chrome-bg-raised, --color-warning). An undefined var() makes the whole declaration invalid, so the browser drops it and the element quietly inherits — the dimmed folder paths in the Storage panels weren't dimmed at all. Fixed in those panels, and a new guard (frontend/src/test/cssTokens.test.js) fails on any bare var(--token) in JSX that isn't defined in a stylesheet or documented as runtime-injected, so a typo can't ship as invisible styling again.

Linux x64 artifacts

2b9e5ac428ad90be0662465fcff244247c9756d30223058254385a449c3ea89e  OmniVoice Studio_0.3.21_amd64.AppImage
4234981ecae54772dba76f05b7d67b823f1f79cef5882a406813400bdf7ad87a  OmniVoice Studio_0.3.21_amd64.AppImage.sig

Windows x64 artifacts

466ed828188631bc19959e1edcf753e03a892c3159699510f9917653dd8b6cd2 *OmniVoice Studio_0.3.21_x64_en-US.msi
93fa3bde043aeb4b9d7eda5f534be5dc8d8d6817f9241935d859e0e05590f40b *OmniVoice Studio_0.3.21_x64_en-US.msi.sig

macOS Intel artifacts

aa5c9e2182ec9707d0b3939278df274f4a9ddea10e87496da12e7e538b2f2855  OmniVoice Studio_0.3.21_x64.dmg
41a69a3db3c2dbdd0955ab6aa0bb63836a9358112a2f4b895fe8d65915fdf8e9  OmniVoice Studio.app.tar.gz
ebc343d107022764e230d3efe109b4977c850d25edcf283ab9c7f13603e1b833  OmniVoice Studio.app.tar.gz.sig

The follow-through release. v0.3.19 promised that "Can't reach the local OmniVoice backend" would stop firing while the backend was merely restarting — and then a user hit it anyway, on 0.3.19, because the fix had a race in it. That's closed properly here. Uninstalling also stopped being a thing only maintainers could do: it's now a button in the app, where the person who asked for it can actually reach it.

Added

• Uninstall is now in the app: Settings → Storage → "Remove all data". The v0.3.19 uninstaller was a script — which never reached the people who needed it, since anyone who installed the .dmg / .msi / AppImage has no repo to run it from (exactly the case in #1089). The app now lists every folder this install owns with its real size, deletes them behind a typed confirmation, and quits. The downloaded model weights are a separate, opt-in checkbox, because that's the standard Hugging Face cache shared with other AI tools on your machine — removing it can delete models OmniVoice never downloaded. Custom and portable install locations are honored, and nothing outside OmniVoice's own folders can be touched. The scripts now also ship as release assets, so you can clean up without launching the app at all. (#1089)

Fixed

• "Can't reach the local OmniVoice backend" could still fire on 0.3.19 — the fix had a hole. The app asks the desktop shell whether a start/restart is in progress before showing that error, but the shell learns of a dead backend from a 2-second poll: when the backend dies mid-generation, the supervisor needs a moment to notice it, record the crash, and flip its state to "restarting". The app was asking once, ~3 seconds in — often still hearing "everything's fine" — and dead-ending on the generic toast anyway. A failed connection contradicts "everything's fine", so that answer is now treated as stale rather than authoritative: the app keeps retrying briefly, letting the shell catch up, which turns the failure into the "backend is restarting — hang tight" banner (and gives the crash report time to be written, so you get the real cause instead of a guess). A shell that has genuinely given up, or no shell at all, still errors immediately. (#1101)

• The uninstaller was leaving the backend's log folder behind on Linux and Windows. It cleaned the app-data, config, and Python-env folders but missed where the backend actually writes backend.log / backend_err.log — ~/.local/state/OmniVoice on Linux and %LOCALAPPDATA%\OmniVoice\Logs on Windows. Both the scripts and the documented path lists now cover them. (#1089)

macOS Apple Silicon artifacts

0154046993f87772b5bf9b59ec37b7c86c7165aef1d7bc1f1b739dad80f198b6  OmniVoice Studio_0.3.20_aarch64.dmg
e040ef798d57cbd53fefb32c92156be613a4fa0ba257a074d207a0376b7ebe04  OmniVoice Studio.app.tar.gz
6d88bb653fcff10bbe8ac5f52349ea77ab3a2529caca1b1d04188b64a072f1a1  OmniVoice Studio.app.tar.gz.sig

Windows x64 artifacts

6288e6d6e8b3a25bbb73fa8b3df48c710435583f30814dc741c49ef7305df7bb *OmniVoice Studio_0.3.20_x64_en-US.msi
d2cb4eea0f2f22e2e4e490419b479b7eb624107a152bf98063cdbc7d68e6ee52 *OmniVoice Studio_0.3.20_x64_en-US.msi.sig

macOS Intel artifacts

4efa7bcf171d99889fddc3b57757267bdaa34113f1560dfb80f0998e91e765b3  OmniVoice Studio_0.3.20_x64.dmg
592e4aa42ce75e62a14d359a037d8aceb89ca1dc4a2d89c4ee199e2340d6d326  OmniVoice Studio.app.tar.gz
2064e0597271f7eab2b1308efba927e2cf339ec968821a4b85ce2358bd3e1eff  OmniVoice Studio.app.tar.gz.sig

The honesty release. Every error in here was already technically true and practically useless — so this round went after the lies the app tells when something goes wrong. "Can't reach the local OmniVoice backend" no longer fires while the backend is simply still starting; a dead Hugging Face mirror no longer strands the setup wizard with advice it can't follow; and a dub that dies mid-transcription now names the actual cause instead of guessing at it. Alongside that: generated speech starts playing on the first chunk instead of the last, and there's finally a real uninstaller.

Added

• Generated speech starts playing on the first chunk, instead of after the last one. Long text is synthesized in chunks, but you used to sit through the entire render before hearing anything. The Studio now streams the preview: audio begins the moment the first chunk is ready and the rest arrives as it renders, so a long passage is audible in about the time the first sentence takes. The take saved to your history is byte-identical to the non-streaming render — streaming is a delivery channel, not a different synthesis path — and if a stream fails mid-flight the app falls back to the classic whole-file flow with nothing half-written to disk. (#1088)

• A clean uninstaller + a straight answer to "where's my data?" OmniVoice is fully local, so removing it is just deleting the folders it wrote — but until now users had to guess which ones. New scripts/uninstall.sh (macOS/Linux) and scripts/uninstall.ps1 (Windows) find every OmniVoice folder — app data, the multi-GB managed Python env, config, logs, and (separately, because it's shared) the Hugging Face model cache — print each with its size as a dry-run first, and delete only on --yes. They honor your custom locations (OMNIVOICE_DATA_DIR, HF_HOME, portable mode) and never touch the app binary. The complete per-platform path list lives in the new docs/install/uninstall.md, linked from the README FAQ, SUPPORT, and troubleshooting. (#1089)

Fixed

• A dub that dies mid-transcription now says what actually happened instead of guessing. "Transcribe stream dropped before emitting any segments. Likely ASR backend failed to load" was a guess — and usually the wrong one. The backend is contract-bound to emit a terminal event on every stream even when it fails, so a stream that simply goes silent means the backend process died underneath it — on smaller GPUs, almost always a native out-of-memory abort while loading the ASR model on top of a still-resident TTS model. The app now consults the desktop shell's crash forensics and tells you that: the exit code, when it happened, a one-click "View crash details" with the captured error output, and the actual next step (free VRAM / pick a smaller ASR model) rather than "check the backend log". With no crash recorded, the original message still stands. (#1062)

• "Can't reach the local OmniVoice backend" stopped crying wolf during startups and restarts. A real backend start or auto-restart takes 10–20+ seconds (Python spawn plus the PyTorch import), but the app's transport retry only bridged ~3 seconds — every click inside that window dead-ended with the scary toast, over and over, even though the backend healed itself moments later. The app now asks the desktop shell whether a start/restart is actually in progress and simply waits for it (up to the shell's own 2-minute restart budget), and shows a single "backend is restarting — hang tight" banner with a "back — carrying on" confirmation — the reconnecting affordance the supervisor has promised since #567. A truly dead backend (or a non-desktop deployment) still errors promptly, and the crash notice keeps telling the honest story.

• A dead Hugging Face mirror can no longer strand the first-run wizard. When a model download failed because the configured mirror was unreachable, the error pointed at Settings — which first-run users can't open (the wizard gates the studio) — and falsely claimed the mirror setting only applies after a restart (downloads actually pick it up per call, immediately). Now the wizard shows the mirror quick-pick (including "Hugging Face (official)") right next to the failed download and retries it the moment you switch; the corrected hint says retry-first, restart only if it still fails. Two backend holes in the same flow are closed too: switching endpoints clears the "failed recently" retry cooldown (no more 429 on the immediate retry), and clearing to official also removes the legacy hf_endpoint pref, which used to silently keep the dead mirror in effect.

Changed

• The first-run wizard shows the app version in its masthead, next to the OmniVoice Studio title — so setup-time screenshots and bug reports identify the build at a glance (the install splash already did).

• Repo root decluttered. Retired the finished planning archives (.planning/, specs/), the pre-React design mockups (design/), the legacy research dir (research/), and stale third-party agent rules (.agents/) — ~110 files of process noise gone; everything stays in git history, and the four load-bearing engine decision docs moved to docs/adr/. Contributor-facing only; the app is unchanged.

Linux x64 artifacts

4aae088250f48d6da432ea10483875ccf26647b60be67de65cfebf465cc6622b  OmniVoice Studio_0.3.19_amd64.AppImage
0fada05ba551b7a2f325fd9ad132f1c48dcf13ee8c6e005120410443a2eb218c  OmniVoice Studio_0.3.19_amd64.AppImage.sig

Windows x64 artifacts

373a7eace6dd9ae279f5ccadfe681dd5beb1b1144981a5ca38cf44e4d1954ef0 *OmniVoice Studio_0.3.19_x64_en-US.msi
3b2083d13093031137e46f46693b5851b01d13cdf9c111d7eecf1aae32ca5c6f *OmniVoice Studio_0.3.19_x64_en-US.msi.sig

macOS Intel artifacts

70499c162e027395894b8a4f0c959e69a926f1a660036a2c552fe106dd69e789  OmniVoice Studio_0.3.19_x64.dmg
586bdb50baf290476bfdc011d6f1a8f2355d919d8aff8b342027fdebe2ff8d93  OmniVoice Studio.app.tar.gz
570c608c81e67ca975f6a90ec07ad3c2336e1b0daa71e1393149944bff278f92  OmniVoice Studio.app.tar.gz.sig