26.8.1-beta

Consecutive tracks now flow into each other with no audible gap — continuous albums (live sets, concept albums, classical movements that run together) finally play the way they were mastered.

bard's audio engine now runs at each file's own sample rate instead of converting everything to one fixed rate — a CD-quality album plays at 44.1 kHz, a hi-res album at 192 kHz, and nothing is resampled inside bard anymore. Moving between albums with different rates makes a brief, deliberate pause while the engine switches — the same "relay click" a hardware DAC makes when it changes rates; within an album, playback stays gapless. For the cleanest path all the way to your DAC, set the output device's rate (Audio MIDI Setup on macOS) to match your library.

If your audio is going to be resampled anywhere on its way out — by bard's engine (rare: only if the system refuses a file's rate) or by the operating system (common: the output device is set to a different rate than the music, e.g. a 48 kHz device playing 44.1 kHz CD rips) — a small circled ! appears next to the quality badge: red when the conversion discards detail (downsampling), theme-colored when it preserves the signal (upsampling). Hover it to see each stage of the chain — file, bard, output device — with its sample rate, and the fix (usually matching the output device's rate in Audio MIDI Setup). Each direction can be hidden under Settings → Appearance.

A new option (Settings → Appearance) that locks bard at exactly 100% volume and retires the volume slider — for setups where loudness belongs to the amp or the system, this guarantees the level leaving bard is never touched. Mute still works either way.

bard can now measure how loud every track in your library actually is (the broadcast-standard EBU R128 measurement), from Settings → Library. Your audio files are never modified — the measurements live in bard's own database. The scan runs in the background, can be stopped at any time, picks up where it left off if you quit, and steps out of the way while you're listening. Files with ReplayGain tags are read too, so an already-tagged library needs no analysis at all.

Off by default, and on request (Settings → Appearance → Player) bard plays every track at a consistent loudness — no more reaching for the volume between a quiet jazz record and a loudness-war master. Play a full album and it moves as one piece: the whole record is nudged by a single amount, so the quiet interlude stays exactly as much quieter than the closer as the artist intended. Mixed queues and shuffle level each track individually. Nothing is ever pushed into clipping, the audio itself is never altered on disk, and when a correction is being applied a small dB chip next to the quality badge says so — including exactly how much and from which source.

Apple Lossless (ALAC), AIFF, Windows Media (WMA), WavPack, Monkey's Audio (APE) and Opus now play in bard. Formats the built-in engine can't decode are decoded by bard itself into its own cache the moment they're needed, so seeking, replays and gapless transitions work exactly like any other track — and lossless sources stay lossless the whole way. After updating, your library picks up previously ignored files automatically on its next scan.

Choose where bard plays — laptop speakers, USB DAC, headphones — from Settings → Appearance → Player, without touching the system's sound settings. If the chosen device disappears (a powered-off DAC, an unplugged dock), audio falls back to the system default and returns on its own when the device comes back. The stored choice survives restarts.

An optional fade-in (Settings → Appearance → Player) so sound eases in over a moment rather than arriving at full level — when you press play, resume from a pause, or unmute. Off by default. Seeks and track changes are never faded, so a gapless album still runs seam to seam.

At full volume bard no longer modifies samples on their way to your DAC (unity gain). Your saved volume setting is unaffected; for highest fidelity, go to settings and toggle "Fixed output level" to "On".

Cover art cross-fades between tracks instead of blanking out and popping back in; the time readouts hold a fixed width instead of nudging the seek bar as the digits tick; and a styling clash no longer makes the whole bar visibly grow for half a second the first time a track's seek-bar waveform is generated. The next track's waveform is also prepared in the background before the track change, so at natural transitions the seek bar appears fully drawn.

If a file had left your library since it was queued, saving the queue as a playlist failed every time — with a raw internal id in the message and no way to clear the offending row. bard now saves the tracks that remain and says what it left out: "Saved 11 tracks — 1 no longer in your library."

Add to Playlist → New Playlist created an empty playlist and quietly dropped the track you started from. The new playlist now holds it — or your whole selection, if you had several rows selected.

With the queue docked, the menu and its Add to Playlist submenu were painted underneath it and could not be clicked. Album, artist and playlist menus were affected the same way, and all four now open above it.

On macOS, pressing Space while typing in any text box — naming a playlist, searching, adding a tag — also starts or stops the music. Use the on-screen controls while typing until this is fixed.

The busier modes can drop frames and make the Now Playing view itself feel sluggish, more so on high-resolution displays and large windows. Switching to a simpler mode restores responsiveness.

On loud modern masters the peak dot on the large flank meters parks at the top of the scale. That endstop sits well below digital full scale, so it indicates loudness, not clipping — and it's why the small meter in the player bar disagrees with it. Your audio is not being distorted.