Release Notes

A large update: a cover of your choosing, a text size for the whole interface, album favourites, text documents in the Booklet, the Signal Path on the Web Remote, and corrections in the Library, on HDMI outputs and in the Signal Generator. Your library, queues, saved playlists and settings are untouched. The first library update after installing takes a little longer than usual; the reason is under The Library.

Covers

• You choose which image is the cover of an album, or of one disc of a box set: right-click the cover in the player or the mini player, an album in the Library or a disc header, and pick any image found in the album's folders or any image file on disk. VeraVox shows it everywhere it shows a cover, the Web Remote, the macOS Now Playing display and a Tuneshine included. Automatic brings back the cover your files give. Your files and folders are never written.
• A box set whose files carry two covers no longer needs the tag-order trick: choose the disc's cover for playback and keep the box on the album's tile.
• Tools ▸ Cover Window (⌘⌥C) shows the current cover large while you listen; the arrow keys leaf through the album's images.

Text size

• Settings has a Text Size card with four steps: Small, Default, Large and Larger. Every window follows at once and nothing is clipped, because rows, columns and popovers grow with the text. If you change nothing, nothing changes. The instrument panels and the Mini Player keep their own lettering; the Help window keeps its own zoom on top.

The Library

• A whole album goes into Favorites, and out, with one click: right-click one or more covers, use the ♥ in the album's header, or the heart in the album header of the Web Remote. Hearts and stars in the lists now sit in one column, whatever the figures beside them.
• The scroll bar is back at the right edge, where every Mac window puts it, with the A-Z index just inside.
• Text files kept beside the music (.txt notes, a .md readme, a release .nfo) join the Booklet after the PDFs, on the Mac and on the Web Remote: an album with notes and no PDF gets the book badge, and a text file opens in a monospaced pane with search and zoom. Per-track lyrics files stay out. After installing, the first library update re-checks every folder once so the badges appear.
• Three tag corrections. WAV files written by a TagLib-based tag editor now sort by their Sort Artist and Sort Album Artist tags, as FLAC and AIFF already did. Compilations credited to Various Artists sort under V even when every track carries its own performer's sort tag. AIFF and MP3 files tagged in Music, or in iTunes before it, arrive with album artist, track numbers, year, genre, composer and compilation flag, so those compilations stay together. Files already in the library take the corrections after Rebuild This Folder in the Folder Manager, since an ordinary update does not re-read files that have not changed.

Playback and devices

• An HDMI or optical output whose only exclusive formats are the Dolby and DTS bitstream carriers used to show as Exclusive Ready, and with Exclusive Mode on a multichannel file above 48 kHz could come out as loud distortion. Such an output now shows as Shared Output, Exclusive is not offered on it, and every file takes the shared path that already played cleanly; the DAC Diagnostic panel lists those carriers as Encoded. If your receiver is connected this way, the new label is the correction, not a loss.
• With Exclusive Mode on, a multichannel file on a device that can carry every channel but has exclusive formats for stereo only used to start in exclusive stereo without asking, surrounds lost. VeraVox now asks and offers Play All Channels (Shared Output) first; Play L/R Only remains. Stereo DACs and virtual devices are not affected.
• If you run a convolver or room correction after VeraVox, the Signal Path used to say High Quality for the handoff to your virtual device. It now says Bit-Perfect Handoff when the device runs at the file's rate, and the popover explains that what comes after the device is yours. It stays High Quality, with the conversion step in view, when the device resamples or the source is DSD.

Signal Generator

• While the generator plays, the player shows a Signal Generator card with the output device, the path and the format badge with the Signal Path LED, and the drawer has a DEVICE line reading HOG, SHARED or FAILED. Before, the player showed its empty face and the drawer never said where the signal was going.
• The generator stops together with the sound: Stop from anywhere, or a track started from the queue, switches it off, where before the drawer and the Vectorscope kept drawing a figure that was no longer there. The queue stays neutral while it plays, and the Web Remote says so instead of showing the previous track.
• In the Modern theme the RATE and DEPTH menus have a readable chevron, RESET, REF 0dB and IMPULSE respond, the bezel keeps its round corners with the drawer open, and the DAC Diagnostic panel's ALL PHYSICAL FORMATS row shows the triangle that opens it.

Web Remote

• The format badge carries the same coloured Signal Path LED as the Mac; tapping it opens the full chain, from the source file to the output device, with the same label and steps. In the Output tab, local devices show their tier: Exclusive Ready, Shared Output or Lossy.
• The Settings tab reads like the rest of VeraVox: devices in grouped panels with the picker's LED and a tick on the active output, switches for Composer, Year and Group by Work, two equal segmented controls for Theme and Waveform. Nothing changes in what the settings do.
• When nothing is playing, Now Playing shows the VeraVox mark in the artwork frame with a hint to pick a track. The album, disc, composer and device names under the title are as readable as the artist's, in both themes and under any cover.
• On an iPad held in landscape, the Playing tab puts the cover on the left and the title, waveform and controls on the right, nothing hidden under the tab bar. The Library ends with the same status line the Mac shows: albums, tracks and total playing time of what the tab lists.

Most of the improvements above began with someone taking the time to write in and describe what they saw.

A wide update: playback settings, the queue, the Library drawer, and a long list of smaller things. Your library, queues, saved playlists and settings are untouched, and there is nothing you need to do.

Playback

• Bit Depth in Settings is now a choice of three: Match source, Prefer 24-bit (the default, and what VeraVox has always done) and Maximum. With Match source a 16-bit file reaches the DAC as 16 bits, and a DAC that displays its input depth shows the file's. If you had Max Bit Depth switched on you will find Maximum selected; if you change nothing, nothing changes.
• An amber line under the picker may say that two of the settings deliver the same depth on your DAC, at some sample rates or at all, even when the DAC's format list shows that depth. It is not a fault. What counts is not only which depths a DAC lists but how each one is laid out: VeraVox keeps every sample in a 32-bit word, Prefer 24-bit and Maximum take only the formats that word is copied into as it is, and a 24-bit format packed into three bytes is not one of them, so on such a DAC both deliver 32 bits. Match source is the one setting that repacks to reach the file's exact depth, and where the DAC has no 16-bit format it lands where Prefer 24-bit does. In every case your bits travel unmodified, with zeros below them when the word is wider: bit-perfect either way. The line only tells you in advance which settings your DAC cannot tell apart.
• A 24-bit ALAC on a DAC that offers only 16-bit exclusive formats at that rate used to go out truncated under the Bit-Perfect label. It now takes the Shared path and says so. Nothing changes for any other file.
• Audio interfaces with no 2-channel output format, as most recording interfaces are, could not play FLAC, WavPack and RF64 files: noise in Exclusive, several times too fast in Shared. They play normally on both paths now; in Exclusive the Signal Path shows Enhanced with a Format Conversion step.
• The DAC Diagnostic panel's table of physical formats gains a Packing column, and the tag beside the format says when the Bit Depth choice made no difference at that rate.

The queue

• Each row reads like a Library row: artist and album under the title, a short format badge such as 24/96 or DSD64, the duration in a straight column, and the title with all the room at every width. Composer and year follow the same Settings switch as the Library.
• The heart and the stars are live, as in Now Playing. A title that does not fit unfolds whole when you rest the pointer on it.
• Right-click a row: Play, Play Next, Move to Top, Move to End, Remove from Queue, Favorites and Rating, Add to Saved Playlist, Show in Library, Get Info, Show in Finder. With several rows selected it acts on all of them and says how many.
• The Web Remote's queue shows the album and the same short badge.

The Library and its drawer

• The Library comes back on the tab you were using: after a relaunch, after ⌘L, and after moving it between the drawer and its own window.
• The drawer can be as wide as the window allows. The album grid shows as many columns as fit at your cover size, and the zoom slider appears in the drawer's status bar once there is room for it. At the usual widths nothing changes.
• The drawer can no longer be squeezed until its title and search field are cut off. If you had saved a narrower drawer, it opens at the new minimum.
• The summary line under the Library reads whole at any width, and while you search it counts what the tab is showing rather than matches hidden in genre, composer, year or comments.

Booklets and the Web Remote

• If an album folder holds more than one PDF, you see them all: tabs above the pages on the Mac (⌃Tab and ⌃⇧Tab step through them), chips on the Web Remote. A box set with a booklet per disc lists all of them from the album page.
• On the Web Remote, a cover you have changed updates without restarting VeraVox.

Network renderers and the diagnostic report

• A renderer that states its service addresses in relative form, as the UPnP standard prescribes, used to appear in the picker and answer no command. It works now; renderers that already worked are untouched.
• The diagnostic report stays readable after hours on the network: a silent device is reported once rather than every five minutes, a device announcing itself under a dozen names appears as one, a control point polling for position is one line per streak, and a Mac that cannot send multicast says so once. Nothing changes on the network or in the audio.

Backups

• Restoring a backup made by an older VeraVox brings the library up to today's model, where before compilations could come back split, or some covers and tags missing. If you never restore a backup, nothing changes.
• A search index that has fallen behind the library is now noticed at launch and rebuilt in the background.

Several of the improvements above began with someone taking the time to write in and describe what they saw.

A deep update rather than a wide one. Your library, queues, saved playlists and settings are untouched, and there is nothing you need to do.

The first time you scroll through the library after updating, VeraVox quietly rebuilds its cover thumbnails in a sharper format as it goes. It happens on that first pass and never again.

A few of the corrections below concern what VeraVox reads from your files. Those settle on albums the scanner reads again, so on an existing library you will see them after a Deep Re-scan, or a Rescan of a single folder from the Folder Manager.

Playback

• VeraVox now starts a track with a real cushion of audio ready, and keeps that cushion topped up while the track plays. On a slow disk, a busy network share, or a drive that stops answering for a moment, the start of a track and any hesitation during it could come out as silence while the progress bar kept moving. On a fast local disk you will notice no difference, because there was nothing to wait for.
• Dragging the progress bar in the last seconds of a track inside a gapless album now lands exactly where you put it.
• Playing to a network renderer that moves to the next track by itself no longer stops at the track change. VeraVox used to read that moment as the renderer having nothing to play, when it was already loading the right track.

The library, while you scroll it

• Scrolling through covers no longer shows you each one arriving, and going back over ground you had already covered no longer reloads them. At the largest cover size the artwork is sharper.
• Fast scrolling in the detached Library window keeps up with your hand. Covers now sit on a quiet ground instead of inside a glass card, and selecting an album tints the ground around the cover rather than the cover itself.
• Every artist has one tile again. An artist could appear in two places in the alphabet at once, with their albums and track count split between the two.
• The A-Z index lands where it says it will. Sorted by Album Artist it often jumped somewhere else, and artists whose name begins with an accented letter had no letter to reach them by. The same applies in All Tracks and in the Web Remote.

What the library remembers

• An album made of one file per disc plus a CUE sheet no longer jumps back to the top of Recently Added every time you re-scan, and albums from SACD ISO images stop after one Rescan from the Folder Manager. A Dynamic Range figure you had already measured is no longer thrown away with it. Dates already lost cannot be recovered, but from here on they stay put.
• The Booklet button no longer disappears from tracks whose tags you have edited in place.

Finding your way around

• The library now says in words what is filtering and sorting it, in a strip above the albums: each active filter as a pill you can lift with a click, and the sort order whenever you have moved it off its default. Before, the only sign was a dot on the filter icon, which is not a thing you look at while scrolling. The command to sort Tags, until now reachable only from the Web Remote, is on the Mac too.
• The A-Z index has been redesigned: quiet letters at rest, a translucent capsule under the pointer, and a glass lens on the letter you are dragging to, with a callout showing it large.
• Right-clicking a folder in Music Folders opens the VeraVox menu, as it does everywhere else, and so does the row's own button. On saved playlists the menu appears at the button you pressed.
• Changing between light and dark with the Library window detached no longer clears your filters, search, tab and open album. The other panels follow a theme change straight away.
• The resizable tool windows go full screen.

The queue

• The queue says how many tracks it holds and how long it runs, and while it plays, how much of it is left. Select some rows and it tells you how long the selection lasts.
• A track dragged to the bottom now lands last, including when you drop it in the empty space below the list, and a line shows where it will land.
• A long album reads as 1:44:23 rather than 104:23, and so does a track that runs over an hour.

The Web Remote

• The transport bar shows the same waveform you see on the Mac, filling from the left while the track is analysed. Drag to seek and the coloured part follows your finger. The ABS/ADP pill beside the duration is the Mac's, and the same preference: change it in one place and it changes in the other.
• Tap the number to the right of the bar to switch between total duration and time remaining. Same preference as the Mac.
• The A-Z index matches the desktop's, and the letter you are on lights up with a callout beside it, so your finger does not hide where you are going.

Smaller things

• The Help section on DSD to PCM now explains how memory behaves on that path, so you can tell in advance what a long file will ask of your Mac.
• The icon beside the output selector reads properly in light theme, and the two network states, VeraVox sending to a renderer and VeraVox receiving as one, share the colour everything on the network uses. The icon tells them apart: an aerial when audio arrives here, a globe when it leaves.
• The tool icons across the top are grey exactly when they cannot be pressed.
• Help → Release Notes opens the full history of what changed in every version, newest first, so notes you updated past are no longer out of reach. The same page is public on veravox.audio, and Sparkle offers a Version History button when you check for updates and are already up to date.

Several of the improvements above began with someone taking the time to describe what they saw.

A larger update than the last two. Your library, queues, saved playlists and settings are untouched, and there is nothing to rebuild. Two things are worth knowing before you start.

The way albums are grouped has been corrected, and VeraVox applies the correction to your existing library by itself the first time you open it after updating. It takes a couple of seconds and asks nothing of you.

VeraVox also reads a few things from your files that it did not read before: the name of a disc inside a box set, the codec actually inside an .m4a, the tags of a file described by a CUE sheet. Those appear on albums the scanner reads again, so on an existing library you will see them after a Deep Re-scan, or after a Rescan of a single folder from the Folder Manager.

Speed

• Adding a folder to the library is substantially faster, on a local disk and over a network drive alike, and so is every update after it. VeraVox reads far less of each file to learn what it needs, so the saving is largest where the reading was slowest. How long your own library takes still depends on where the music lives and on what sits between VeraVox and it. You can also start listening sooner: the first tracks become playable while the rest of the folder is still being read. Track lengths read from FLAC files are exact now, where they could be overstated by a fraction of a second.
• Adding a track to a long queue, reordering it, or loading a saved playlist onto it is immediate, whatever the length of the queue and wherever the music lives. On a library held on a network drive those gestures could hold VeraVox still for a long while, and gestures made in quick succession piled the waits up.
• When the VeraVox window is covered, minimised, or the app is hidden, its animations stop and resume untouched when you bring it back. Listening with VeraVox in the background now costs a small fraction of what it did. The analysis instruments are unaffected and go on measuring either way.

Albums and box sets

• An album whose tracks name different artists, and which carries no album artist of its own, used to appear split into one album per artist: a soundtrack, or a classical record with two orchestras. It now stays whole, under Various Artists, without anything being written to your files. If you tag your own album artists, nothing changes for you, by design. A new switch in Settings, Group Untagged Compilations, is on by default and turning it off restores the previous grouping exactly and immediately.
• A box set ripped as one file per disc with a CUE sheet beside each one appeared as one album per disc, titled after the disc, with no disc number, genre or year. It is now a single album with its real title, its Disc 1 and Disc 2 sections, and the metadata the files declare. Single disc rips made the same way gain their genre and year too.
• A box set whose discs have names of their own shows the name beside the number, so Disc 1 reads as the disc is called, including when that name is declared in the form older ID3 tags are obliged to use.
• Moving a box set, or any folder with subfolders inside it, to the Trash makes it leave the Library on its own within seconds, as flat album folders already did. It used to stay behind as a ghost album until the next update.
• Sorting by Year, or by Album Artist and Year, puts albums that share a year in the order they were released rather than in alphabetical order. This applies where your files declare a full date; with the year alone nothing changes.
• Updating the library is faster, and an album copied in while VeraVox is watching no longer arrives without its title or cover. Every update used to re-read hundreds of files that had not changed. A file already in your library that arrived without its tags, which neither an update nor a Deep Re-scan could repair before, is recovered by a Deep Re-scan now.

What VeraVox tells you about a file

• The Signal Path names the codec that is really inside the file. A track bought from a store, an AAC inside an .m4a, used to read ALAC: a claim of lossless decoding over a compressed file, on the one screen that exists to tell the truth about the signal. It now reads AAC and says the decode is lossy, and the Library rows, album cards, Track Info and Web Remote say the same. The Lossless, Lossy and Hi-Res filters classify by the real codec, so an AAC album in an .m4a leaves Lossless and appears under Lossy, where you would look for it.
• The panel listing supported formats names M4A, the extension ALAC and AAC arrive with from an iTunes or Apple Music library. Those files always opened and played; the list simply did not mention them.
• A dropout caused by a starved buffer is recorded on every playback path and appears in the exported diagnostic log, even if the Stream Inspector was closed at the time. If you report one, the evidence is inside the file you send, without anyone having to ask you to keep a panel open while you listen.

Fixes

• In shuffle towards certain network players, HQPlayer 6 among them, playback stopped by itself at the end of a track. Play restarted the same track and stopped again at the same point, and only Next moved things on. The queue now advances by itself with those players too.
• With the Tuneshine® panel enabled and the display unreachable, every track change held the interface still for several seconds, and the Sample Rate Switch Pause countdown appeared already half spent. Neither happens now, and covers start appearing again on their own as soon as the display can be reached.
• On macOS 27 beta the Settings popover appeared visibly broken, with titles cut off under the left edge and two of its cards overflowing on the right. It is whole again, on macOS 26 and on macOS 27 beta alike.
• The note and tip boxes in Help follow the width of the column, at any window width and any text size, instead of standing as wide as their own text.

Most of what is above came from someone taking the time to describe what they saw.

An ordinary update. Your library, queues, saved playlists and settings are untouched, and there is nothing to rebuild or re-scan afterwards.

Playback

• Tracks played through Shared Output could stop before their end, and the next one would start. It happened when the output device was sitting at a sample rate higher than the file's, and it affected MP3, AAC, ALAC, WAV and AIFF: a 44.1 kHz track ended at about 46% of itself on a device set to 96 kHz. The time display kept showing the full duration, so a track simply ended before a number that was right, and seeking inside one of them landed somewhere other than where it was asked to. Both are fixed. FLAC, WavPack, DSD and RF64 files were never affected, and neither was Exclusive Ready playback.

Appearance

• The Appearance menu marks the theme in use, so you can see which of the three is active and that your choice was applied. The sun and moon button now reads what is actually on screen: under the system theme on a dark Mac it offers the light one, where before it offered dark and pressing it changed nothing. The Analog and Modern choice for the instruments works the same way.

Audio Analysis

• When a file is called out as fake hi-res for two reasons at once, the sentence explaining that this is a measurement and not an accusation can be read in full. Its last line used to be cut in half.
• The numbers at the top and bottom of the spectrum's dB scale can be read. They were cut across the middle. No grid line has moved, so the graph says exactly what it said before.

Smaller things

• Opening a smart playlist and coming back leaves you where you were in the list, rather than at the top. Albums, Artists, Genres, Composers and Tags already worked that way; Smart Playlists was the one section that did not.
• Adding a tag in the Web Remote offers the tags already in your library, the way the desktop editor does. Type a fragment, or tap a name, instead of remembering the exact spelling on a phone or tablet.

Most of what is above came from someone taking the time to describe what they saw.

The first update since release. Your library, queues, saved playlists and settings are untouched: this is an ordinary update, and there is nothing to rebuild or re-scan afterwards.

Streaming to network players

• High resolution files could break up when VeraVox served them to a network renderer, with DSD256 and DXD affected first. The cause sits outside VeraVox, in the way recent versions of macOS move data on Macs whose network card offloads segmentation. VeraVox now has two ways of sending the audio and chooses between them by itself: it opens the route that is not affected and serves the music through it, and if that route cannot be opened it goes on using the previous one, so your renderer keeps playing either way.

Windows

• VeraVox remembers where its windows were and how big they had been. The main window had been reopening at its default size on every launch.
• Help is a window of its own. It no longer holds the rest of the app still, so you can read it while music plays, keep it pinned above the player, and set the size of its text with the controls at the foot of its sidebar.
• Help renders its own formatting instead of showing you the markup.
• With a narrow player window, opening Settings from the expanded tool row closed the popover at once. It stays open.

Library

• Album covers follow the file. A cover used to be written once and never revisited, so replacing the artwork on disk and re-scanning changed nothing on screen. A pass that re-reads the file now applies the cover it finds there.
• Two editions of the same album, scanned in the same batch, could end up sharing a single cover. They no longer do.
• Launching with the Library attached to the player is quick again, without the spinning wheel.

Smaller things

• Playback Mode now has a submenu in Tools. It could be reached only from the popover of the output picker, and two people have told us they could not find it there.
• In UPnP Renderer Mode, a control point that presses Play while VeraVox has no local output selected gets a clear answer instead of silence.
• Tools then Booklet is dimmed when there is no booklet to open, rather than opening nothing.
• The diagnostic report carries the physical formats your selected device offers, and the state of the playback options.
• Tuneshine® is written with its registered mark.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to describe what they saw. Most of what is above exists for that reason.

This is the released version of the app you have been testing. Nothing in the playback path has changed since the last beta: same engine, same formats, same signal path.

What changes for you

• The beta period is over. On first launch VeraVox offers a 30-day free trial, with no card and no account, or you can enter a licence key you already have.
• Your library, queues, saved playlists and settings are untouched. This is an ordinary update, not a reinstall.

New since the last beta

• New in Settings: if you own a Tuneshine™ LED display, VeraVox can show the cover art of what is playing on it. It sends the artwork embedded in your own files, so a self-made rip shows its real cover. Off by default, and everything stays on your local network.
• Search understands more of what you type: a minus in front of a word excludes it, and punctuation inside a title or a name no longer breaks the query.
• The Smart Playlists and saved playlists lists can be filtered by name, in the app and in the Web Remote, and smart playlists gained a "does not contain" rule for text fields.
• The instrument windows look different: the panels and the booklet reader now take the same window material, corners and border as every other window in the app.
• The scanning indicator now belongs to the scan that is really running: it no longer vanishes part way through a rebuild, and it no longer flickers when a background check finds nothing to do.
• The diagnostic report is readable again. A single repeated line about network devices was most of its length, and each device is now reported once.

Thank you. Several of these exist because you took the time to describe what you saw.