26.9.0-beta
2026-09 LATESTSettings page is reorganized in a sensible way, better representation of colors for Now Playing and a bunch of bugfixes and polish.
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Tooltip on hover for buttons with non-obvious functions that only show icons without text.
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The output device can be chosen from Now Playing.
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The compact mini-bar's progress line is now a seek bar, along its top edge.
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A new visualizer based on orbiting particles.
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Settings page has been reorganized into four tabs: Appearance, Playback, Library and About.
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The output device is chosen from the player bar instead of the settings page
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New color-matching pipeline for the waveform and visualizer in Now Playing.
Previously, bard could over or under-emphasize certain colors when matching the Now Playing elements to the album art. A new pipeline aims to reduce that mismatch and attempts to match the colors as a human might perceive them.
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Artwork fetch progress shows next to the button that started it.
While bard is fetching album art or artist portraits, the counts appear under Fetch Missing Artwork in Online Metadata rather than inside the Library statistics.
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The player knows when the queue has finished.
When the last track ended, the bar kept showing Pause, and neither the play button, Previous, nor double-clicking the track in the queue would start it again. The bar now switches to Play when the queue ends, and each of those three starts the finished track from the beginning. A one-track queue on Repeat All also restarts reliably instead of occasionally stopping silently.
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Typing a space no longer starts or stops playback.
On macOS, a space typed into any text field — a tag name, the search box, a playlist title — reached the player as well as the field. It now stays in the field. Space still plays and pauses when you aren't typing.
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Restoring a backup now brings your settings back as well, not just your music.
Settings that are restored: automatic check for updates, artwork fetch, theme, volume normalization, fixed output, soft unmute, resample marker options, visualizer settings. The settings now travel with the database and any associated backup. Deliberately not saved in a backup: output device selection and view preferences (how you sort your album or song list for example). Restoring now also stops playback and clears the queue.
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bard no longer opens to an empty, unusable library when its port is busy.
If anything already held bard's port, for example a leftover server process from a previous run or a second copy of bard, the app opened normally without showing anything. It now spots the busy port and tries to find another one. In the rare case it still can't start, it says so instead of failing quietly.
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Tracks played from a tag now behave like tracks played from anywhere else.
Volume normalization was silently skipped for anything queued from By Tags. Track Info opened from a tag was also missing its track number, disc number and file size, and its album name led nowhere. All should be fixed now.
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If bard's server stops unexpectedly, bard now restarts it and tells you when it can't.
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Going back a step during initial setup no longer dead-ends.
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The Particles visualizer no longer freezes into a square blob on loud tracks.
Loud music still gathers the cloud toward the middle, but now into a soft oval that follows the window's shape, and the particles keep drifting while it does. Quiet passages let the cloud spread back out.
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The eye button in Now Playing now hides the other buttons in its column
Previously it would only dim them. The eye icon stays to bring everything back.
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In a narrow window, the top navigation now uses the room it has.
The nav bar shows as many menu items as can fit, and extra ones end up in a "⋯" menu.
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Artist and album names inside Track Info are clickable again.
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Toggle settings no longer flash Off before showing your saved choice.
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Deleting a playlist now shows a trash icon, like everything else that deletes.
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The volume-normalization chip in the player no longer gets cut off.
EARLIER
- 26.8.2-betabard is fully offline, with two online features that are fully opt-in.
- 26.8.1-betaGapless playback, sample-rate reporting, loudness metering, more file formats supported, and more...
- 26.8.0-betaThis is a beta release intended and targeted to larger audiences and general public use. Almost all the changes are for polish and consistency between various menus and views. I can't test everything (certainly not on Windows), so expect bugs/issues.
- 26.3.1-betaNo idea, totally forgot, not worth digging through git history for it
- 26.3.0-betaFirst public build
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