Waves

Release notes

Changelog

Release notes based on the app's CHANGELOG.md.

1.3.0

Added

  • Add Reset Mix. Applying a profile with saved levels now remembers how every app was set first, and one click in the toolbar or menu bar puts everything back. Apply Meeting for the call, reset when it ends.
  • Add a default profile. Right-click a profile and choose Apply at Startup (or pick one in Settings > Profiles) and Waves applies its levels every time it starts.
  • Add an About window with the version number, an update check, and links to the website, source, and privacy policy.
  • Show live processing in the wave visualizer: streams shaped by an equalizer gain visible texture, streams held back by Sidechain Focus ride lower at their real reduced level, and small EQ and Focus chips name what's active.

Changed

  • Merge the two equalizers into one Equalizer card in Sound. It edits the shared All Managed Audio curve or any single app, switched with one chip row that also marks which streams have EQ on. The per-app side panel is gone, along with its overlap problems in small windows.
  • Reorganize Settings into General, Mixer, Profiles, Shortcuts, Setup, Advanced, and Help. Each sidebar row says what it contains, related settings live together, and the update check appears in Settings, the app menu, and the About window.
  • Rewrite descriptions across the app in plain language with concrete examples.

Fixed

  • Reserve headroom for the real combined EQ curve instead of only the largest single band. Stacked boosts on neighboring bands could previously exceed the reserve and clip loud audio.
  • Keep clipping protection in place until an EQ change has fully faded in, instead of releasing it about 20 ms early.

1.2.1

Fixed

  • Load the in-app logo from the packaged application resources without relying on SwiftPM's build-directory fallback. Fresh downloads now launch correctly on Macs that do not have the Waves source checkout.
  • Run packaged-app smoke tests with access to local Swift build artifacts denied, preventing clean-machine resource failures from passing release QA.

1.2.0

Added

  • Add a dedicated Sound workspace with Managed Audio EQ for every stream routed through Waves, including Simple and Advanced bands, presets, and combined clipping protection when per-app and managed equalizers are stacked.
  • Add content-aware app policies for Lecture or Voice, Meeting, Music, Video or Media, Game, and Other, with Foreground, Normal, Background, and Never Adjust priorities.
  • Add Sidechain Focus with Assigned Priorities, Follow Front App, and Smart Hybrid modes. Smart Hybrid promotes an audible frontmost app by one priority tier while preserving explicit priorities as guardrails.
  • Add Lecture Focus, Media First, Balanced, and Custom adaptive strategies for common mixes such as a clear lecture over background music or media over a low-priority meeting.
  • Add independent Waves and Graphite palettes, each available in System, Light, and Dark appearance modes.
  • Add a four-stage guided setup for privacy, audio readiness, common preferences, and a final configuration summary.
  • Add Setup & Repair with live checks, direct links to the matching macOS privacy, Accessibility, Login Items, and Sound panes, route recovery, and a non-destructive Redo Guided Setup flow.

Changed

  • Replace the app icon with the new cyan wave identity across the app bundle, Finder, Dock, and distribution image.
  • Redesign the mixer, inspector, settings, menu bar, and shared surfaces around a quieter native visual system with consistent themed fills, strokes, selection, and status colors.
  • Replace the single legacy adaptive role with independent content type and priority policies while migrating existing Auto, Voice, Media, and Ignore choices.
  • Process adaptive focus from transient local activity and speech measurements. Waves never records or exports audio samples and never pauses or mutes apps for Sidechain Focus.
  • Treat persisted backend capability status as unprobed until the live backend refreshes it, preventing stale permission and route-health claims at launch.

Fixed

  • Reserve combined EQ headroom before processing so stacked boosts do not clip full-scale managed audio.
  • Require audible activity before front-app focus can trigger, require detected speech for lecture and meeting sources, and keep Never Adjust immune to adaptive gain.
  • Keep a Background meeting from leapfrogging explicitly Foreground media in Smart Hybrid mode.
  • Keep first-run setup non-mutating until the user explicitly chooses Continue, including Settings navigation and application shutdown.
  • Reject oversized URL-scheme payloads before Foundation URL parsing.
  • Bound decoded profile counts, entry counts, and names for both persisted libraries and imported backups.

1.1.0

Added

  • Per-app equalizer and Adaptive Mix with simple or advanced curves, presets, app roles, and locally persisted settings.
  • Live mixed-waveform visualizer: a flowing header ribbon that visualizes the combined audio energy of everything currently playing (root-sum-of-squares mix, eased between samples for smooth 60fps motion). Calm when silent, alive when sound flows; freezes to a static level bar under Reduce Motion and pauses its render loop when idle.
  • Genuine Liquid Glass: adopts Apple's glassEffect / .glassProminent on the floating layer (sheets, primary actions) on macOS 26 (Tahoe), with native .borderedProminent controls and a real NSVisualEffectView window backdrop on macOS 14.2–15. Content cards stay tonal (not glass): glass belongs to the floating layer only, per Apple's guidance. Honors Reduce Transparency (opaque) and Increase Contrast (stronger borders).
  • Profiles: group the apps you use together (e.g. Work, Gaming) and switch between them from the sidebar or menu bar. A profile can be a pure grouping or optionally capture each app's volume, mute, and boost. Reframes the old "presets"; an existing presets.json is migrated to profiles.json on first launch.
  • Browser & Electron audio attribution: Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Helium, Brave, Edge, Arc) and Electron apps emit audio from a sandboxed helper/"Audio Service" subprocess that isn't a normal running application; Waves now walks the helper's executable path back to the enclosing .app so these apps show as Live and are fully controllable: including picture-in-picture / popout video.
  • Quick Pin in the menu bar: one-click pin/unpin on every menu-bar row; pinned apps lock to the top and survive the app (and Waves) quitting and relaunching (pin state is stored in preferences, not just the live session).
  • A refined visual identity: an in-app wave mark that gently animates while audio is live, gradient per-row level meters, and consistent card/section styling.
  • Per-app output-device routing: send each app to a chosen output device.
  • Per-app exclude/ignore escape hatch for apps that dislike being tapped.
  • Live per-app level meters (visibility-gated; near-zero idle cost).
  • Real audio-capture (TCC) permission detection, surfaced in onboarding and diagnostics, replacing an OS-version proxy.
  • Global output-device switching from the menu-bar panel.
  • Full keyboard operation of the mixer and VoiceOver rotors; Reduce Motion, Increase Contrast, and Dynamic Type support.
  • Mute provenance (auto-pause never overrides a user mute, and resumes correctly after relaunch).
  • "Copy Diagnostics" route-health export.
  • Versioned persistence envelope; testable realtime DSP (TapDSP).
  • Privacy manifest, PRIVACY.md, SECURITY.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, CHANGELOG.md, a Homebrew cask, and tag-driven notarized release CI.
  • MIT license.

Changed

  • First-run privacy setup now records explicit local consent before the audio backend starts or attempts any Core Audio capture.
  • Per-app changes now use generation-safe complete intents, so superseded async work cannot overwrite a newer volume, mute, EQ, boost, exclusion, or route.
  • Per-app intent state remains durable while apps are offline, and profile applies retain one truthful ordered result for every source row.
  • Preferences, profiles, sessions, and device presets now use bounded coalesced persistence with surfaced write failures and explicit flush boundaries.
  • Release packaging and CI now gate both arm64 and x86_64 slices, matching dSYM UUIDs, the macOS 14.2 floor, bundle metadata, privacy assets, and package layout.
  • Copied diagnostics now report truthful version/OS, structured authorization, device/readiness, route/backend, persistence, and checked-cleanup state in a bounded privacy-labelled format with no audio samples.
  • App pinned to a dark appearance (matches the design charter; fixes light-mode readability).
  • Menu-bar icon reflects live state instead of average volume.
  • Search spans all visible apps instead of only the selected scope.
  • "Presets" are now "Profiles" throughout the UI; the waves://apply-preset URL command still works as a deprecated alias for waves://apply-profile.
  • New-profile shortcut is ⌘N (replacing the old ⌘S save-preset shortcut).

Fixed

  • Unsupported or inconsistent native audio formats and missing current-output device queries now fail closed instead of fabricating a usable route.
  • App termination now performs bounded, checked shutdown: pending mutations and persistence settle before native route cleanup, with degraded/timed-out results reported rather than silently assumed clean.
  • Equalizer access is now visible on every menu-bar app row instead of being discoverable only through the row's context menu.
  • Local release builds now carry version 1.1.0 and build 2 so macOS can clearly distinguish them from the earlier 1.0.0 build during an upgrade.
  • Local packaging falls back to the compatible macOS 26 SDK when Command Line Tools provides SwiftUI macro declarations without the required plugin.
  • Universal packaging keeps arm64 and x86_64 products in separate SwiftPM scratch directories so one architecture cannot overwrite the other.
  • A managed app no longer drops out of the Live list the moment you adjust its volume: Live membership now follows the live-level meter, not a stale snapshot, so a playing app stays Live while it's still producing sound.
  • Numerous pre-publish audit fixes: data-loss-on-decode, prefs wipe on upgrade, reorder off-by-one, tap/aggregate-device leaks and actor reentrancy, realtime-thread blocking, boost clipping, zombie taps after an app quits, dead device-change handling, and copy/accessibility gaps.

Removed

  • Decorative volume-control-mode picker (it was a no-op).