26.8.2-beta

Everything that can touch the internet is off until you turn it on. Setup gains an Online Features step naming the two things bard can use a connection for: looking up missing artwork (album and artist names go to TheAudioDB — nothing else) and checking for new versions (a request that says nothing about you, your library, or even which version you're running). If your library predates this release, bard asks once, in a short "new settings to review" dialog that also shows anything already decided. Every answer can be changed later in Settings, each setting carries a small ⓘ that explains exactly what it does, and declining costs you nothing you can't do by hand: artwork can be set from your own image files, and releases are always published on bard.fm.

Fetched covers and artist portraits used to be re-requested from TheAudioDB every single time they appeared on screen. Now bard downloads each image once, keeps it in its own database (so backups carry your artwork too), and serves it from your machine from then on. Turning artwork lookups off never removes what was already fetched, a Settings button deletes everything bard ever downloaded (your own images are untouched), and an image you set yourself always outranks anything fetched. Missing artwork is also no longer remembered as permanently missing — art that appears at the source later now arrives on a future fetch instead of never.

Check for Updates now ends in a dialog naming your installed version, the latest one, and where releases live. When automatic checks are off, finding an update never downloads it by itself; downloading is its own button press.

The app window can no longer load anything remote — no page, script, image or font can arrive from outside your machine, and nothing can navigate the app itself to a website. Links open in your own browser and say where they go before you click.

Several views switched to their dense layout at their own private widths, so narrowing the window rearranged them one after another. They now all switch at the same point.

The typeface bard draws its interface in was being downloaded from Google's font servers rather than shipped with the app, so every launch opened a connection to them before anything reached the screen. The typeface now ships within bard.