Changelog

All notable changes to Open Audio Analyzer are recorded here. The format is defined in CLAUDE.md; the short version is that 📐 Measurement always comes first, because a change to a reported number can invalidate a decision somebody already made about a master.

This project follows Semantic Versioning.

Unreleased

✨ Added

• The AppImage can update itself. It carries update information, and every release now publishes the .zsync file beside it, so AppImageUpdate, or a tool built on it, replaces it with the newest release and downloads only the parts that changed. An AppImage from 0.16.0 or earlier carries none, so moving off one still means downloading the new file once.

0.16.0 — 2026-10-05

✨ Added

• A USB cable needs nothing switched on. An iPad plugged into a publishing desktop now appears under Over USB with no developer mode, reached through the service Finder syncs it with — built into macOS, usbmuxd on Linux, the Apple Devices app on Windows. An Android tablet plugged into a publishing Mac or Linux desktop is asked to become its USB accessory, Android offers to open Open Audio Analyzer, and it appears in the same place with no USB debugging and no adb. A device is asked once each time it is plugged in, and never while PUBLISH is off; while it is the desktop’s accessory its files are not offered to the desktop. On Windows an Android tablet still needs USB debugging and adb. (#5)
• A tablet on a USB cable is a display. An Android tablet plugged into the desktop now shows up in ATTACH under Over USB, marked with a plug where a network host has the broadcast mark, and attaching to it bypasses the room’s Wi-Fi. While PUBLISH is on, the desktop forwards its display port to every Android device adb can see (adb reverse), so it needs adb on the desktop and USB debugging on the tablet. A host found over USB tethering is listed in the same section. An iPad has no equivalent the desktop can drive, so this is Android only. Attaching a machine to itself is still refused; what is refused now is this running copy, not every address on this machine. (#5)
• ATTACH remembers. Every host this device has been a display for is listed under Recent, newest first, up to five, with its name and address, and each one can be forgotten. A host is remembered only once it has answered, so a mistyped address never comes back. In a room that blocks discovery that is the difference between typing an IP address at every session and tapping it once. (#5)
• A display keeps the screen on. While a host is attached, an Android or iPad display no longer goes to sleep, and the system’s own sleep setting applies again the moment it disconnects. On by default; OPTIONS on the display’s bar turns it off. (#5)
• The display has options of its own: OPTIONS on its bar opens This display, with the refresh rate — the one the canvas on this device uses — and the screen setting above. A tablet that falls behind a heavy layout can now be told to redraw at 30 fps; before this it ran at 60 whatever it was set to. (#5)
• A single tab can be saved, loaded and put back. A tab’s menu has Revert to saved, which returns it to the preset as it was last opened or saved in one undoable step, and Export…, which writes it as a preset with one tab. File › Import tabs… adds tabs from any preset file beside the ones already there, asking which when there are several, and Export this tab… exports the one showing. A tab file is an ordinary preset, so File › Open reads it too. Undo was not enough: it is shared by every tab and forgotten at the next launch. (#5)
• An AAX build for Pro Tools. The plugin now builds a fourth format on macOS and Windows, universal on macOS and targeting 14.2 like the other bundles, and it ships in the oaa-plugin-<platform> release archive. It is not signed for Pro Tools: an AAX bundle needs a signature from PACE’s wraptool made against an Avid developer account holding a signing certificate, which is a different thing from the code signature every bundle already carries and which this project does not have yet. Unsigned, it loads in a Developer build of Pro Tools and in Avid’s developer tools and nowhere else, and a released Pro Tools refuses it by simply not listing it. That is why no installer carries it — a ticked checkbox that installs something no DAW will show you is worse than no checkbox. The bundle passes Avid’s own AAX Validator: it describes itself, its Describe function validates, every effect instantiates and de-instantiates under every host context, and it survives a thousand load/unload cycles.
• The website has a page at /alternatives/decibel for readers arriving from a search for a free alternative to Decibel by Process.Audio. It states what the two share, the four differences there is published evidence for, and the repository’s Known gaps rather than a softened version of them. The claim that this project reimplements Decibel’s ideas has been in README.md since the first commit and was on no page of the site.
• The website has an Impressum at /impressum — the provider identification § 5 DDG requires of a German site: name, postal address, telephone, email, and who is responsible for the content under § 18 Abs. 2 MStV. German first, because that is the word a German reader looks for in a footer, with an English translation under it. Both footers link it as “Legal Notice (Impressum)” — the English for a site written in English, and the German word because that is the one § 5’s recognisability is judged by — and it is in the sitemap.
• Open Audio Analyzer is on the App Store, free, for iPad — and the front page’s App Store badge is a link to it. The badge stood there dimmed and unlinked through the wait for review, which said “not yet” to nobody who did not already know it was waiting; that state and the opacity rule behind it are gone with the wait. The store carries the build Apple has passed rather than the version tagged last, so the listing can sit behind the desktop downloads — TestFlight still takes every tagged release first, and Installing says which is which.
• --tab=<n> opens the application on a tab, counted the way the tab strip counts. It exists for the screenshot scripts, which no longer press a key at the window — see Internal — and it works on every platform.
• The website and the documentation name the DAWs the plugin has been tested in — Ableton Live, Logic Pro, Cubase, FL Studio and Studio One — and say what it costs in so many words: free, with no paid tier, no trial and no account. They also state the channel ceiling, eight, mono through 7.1. “Free and open-source” was the only price on the site, and it reads as a licence to anyone looking for a price.

⚡ Changed

• The two dynamics readings are printed as PSR and PLR again, the names the AES gives the arithmetic and the ones every other meter prints — and Settings › Dynamics switches every label to the specification’s own ODR-S / ODR-I: on each module, in the metric picker, in the target editor, in the report panel, card and text export, and on a paired tablet, which is sent the choice beside the skin and the target. 0.15.0 renamed the pair to ODR-S / ODR-I alone, and a person who typed PSR into the metric picker found nothing and concluded the meter did not measure it. Nothing measured has changed and no re-measure is warranted: the arithmetic, the ids in a preset, the odr_i and odr_s_min keys of a JSON report and the odr_i_min / odr_s_min floors of a delivery target are all as they were.
• The oaa CLI takes the same choice as --names psr or --names odr, which spells the text report and --list-targets; it reads no settings file and still does not.

🐛 Fixed

• An Android tablet is called Android tablet where it names itself — as a publishing host, and in a desktop’s list of tablets on a cable — rather than localhost, which is all Android tells an application its name is.
• Save as, Export this tab and the report exports work on an Android tablet and on an iPad. They opened nothing and saved nothing on either, because file_selector has no save dialog on Android or iOS; they now open the system’s own document picker. A preset opened on a tablet is now the file that was picked rather than a copy of it, so Save writes back to that file — it used to write to the copy, succeed, and leave the file untouched — and the file is remembered across launches like on every other platform.
• A display that falls behind is no longer drawn seconds in the past. A tablet slower than the frames it was sent — a heavy layout on an Android tablet was the report — worked through a backlog in order, so the delay grew and nothing on screen said so. The host skipped a display only while its last write was still leaving the machine, and every network and kernel buffer between the two filled before that happened; in a test, a display that stopped reading was queued 62 of 120 frames. A display now tells the host each time it has read a snapshot, and the host sends it at most a tenth of a second ahead of that, dropping the rest. A display from an earlier release still works, and is fed as before. (#5)
• The privacy policy was 128 px wider than a phone screen. The address to report a privacy question to is printed as a link whose text is the URL, and a 57-character word has no break opportunity in it — so on a 390 px phone it laid out at its own width and pushed the document sideways. Nothing scrolled, because the page cannot scroll sideways, so what a reader saw instead was a page 128 px narrower than the window from the header down, with every heading and every paragraph short of the right edge. Long links now break.
• Every page carrying the one-line footer was 37 px wider than a 360 px phone, for the same reason and on a smaller scale: the row of five links in it did not wrap. Small enough to look like nothing, and on every documentation page, which is the combination that makes a bug read as the design.
• npm run check reported every page clean while three of them overflowed. It opened each page in an emulated mobile viewport, and mobile emulation scales a too-wide document down until it fits — so the width the page reported was the width of its own content and the check compared a quantity with itself. It now measures at the width it asked for, and fails outright if that is not the width the page got.
• The oscilloscope on the website draws a continuous waveform. It drew a comb — half a beat of trace, a gap the same width, over and over — on both the front page’s still and the live analyzer behind it. The recording is not at fault and carries no audio: the browser replays the engine’s readings and reads the waveform out of the track it is already playing, and it was handing the module one 1,024-sample block for every 2,205 samples the clock said had gone past. The module is right to draw the shortfall as blank columns — audio that was measured and lost is not a straight line — so the fix is the window, which is now the four blocks the interface allows for and covers any cadence down to eleven frames a second. The waveform also no longer runs nine per cent fast on a machine whose audio output is not at the track’s sample rate: both web targets now decode at the recording’s rate, and where a browser refuses that, the window is stepped into the reading’s time base instead. Nothing the application, the CLI or the plugin measures is affected — this is the website’s replay source alone, and it now has a test.
• The website’s Modules section told readers to drag a meter onto the canvas, which is not a gesture Open Audio Analyzer has or has ever had: there is no palette to drag a meter from, and dragging on the canvas moves a module that is already placed. It now names the ones that exist — right click the canvas, or long press it on a tablet — which is what README.md has said since the first release, so the first instruction on the page can be followed. The credit under the front page’s live analyzer also says what that canvas is: one measured pass of the track, replayed on a fixed eight, and not the canvas the section two screens below is about. (#4)
• The plugin told every DAW it was 0.11.0. The VST3, the Audio Unit and the AAX have all declared that version since 0.12.0 — in each bundle’s version field and in the VST3’s moduleinfo.json — while the installer that carried them put the real version on the application, so a host listed a plugin four releases behind the program it streams to. The bundles were built from the right commit every time and nothing they measure was affected; the number was a literal in plugin/CMakeLists.txt that a release commit was expected to bump, and after 0.11.0 nothing did. It is now read from pubspec.yaml, and the macOS package refuses to build if a plugin bundle’s version is not the one on the box — which is also what catches a stale build tree. A DAW that still shows 0.11.0 after this release has cached the old bundle, or is loading a copy from ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins, which no installer here writes to or can remove.
• GNOME Software and KDE Discover offered 0.11.0. The flatpak’s AppStream metadata lists a row per release and its newest row is the version a software centre prints; it stopped being written after 0.11.0, so four releases installed while the store beside them described the one before them. Every release through 0.15.0 is listed now.
• The AppImage’s desktop entry passes the validator on Ubuntu 22.04. That version predates the SingleMainWindow key and rejects it, and it is the one AppImageHub’s catalog test runs, so 0.15.0 was refused a listing on that one line. The AppImage now carries GNOME’s older X-GNOME-SingleWindow, which gnome-shell reads the same way; the flatpak keeps the standard key.

🚧 Internal

• docs/WIRE.md defines 0x0007 RECEIVED, the one frame a display sends on the display port: empty, once per snapshot, read by the host only to decide what not to send. Added under protocol version 5 without moving it, the way 0x0006 was; a host that predates it never reads the socket, and a display that predates it is judged by the flush alone. The display port still carries no control of any kind. (#5)
• A fourth Android channel and a third iOS one, OaaKeepAwake, over com.openaudioanalyzer.oaa/keep_awake: FLAG_KEEP_SCREEN_ON on the activity’s window, and isIdleTimerDisabled. (#5)
• docs/WIRE.md defines the USB carriage: how a tablet’s relay carries each display connection as a channel of one cable, on loopback 47823 and 47824. It changes no table of the display port, and inside a channel the bytes are the display port’s. (#5)
• packages/oaa_usb, a fifth local package: the Android Open Accessory protocol over a vendored libusb 1.0.30 (LGPL-2.1), built on macOS and Linux and tested by the engine job on all three. OaaAccessory.kt pumps the accessory into the tablet’s relay and is not a channel. (#5)
• A fifth Android channel and a fourth iOS one, OaaDocuments, over com.openaudioanalyzer.oaa/documents: the system’s create and open pickers, and reads and writes through the ContentResolver on Android and a security-scoped bookmark on iOS. A picked document travels through the app as <handle>#<display name>, routed by ConfigStore, because a handle need not contain the file’s name.
• robots.txt names the AI crawlers rather than leaving them to User-agent: * — OpenAI’s three agents, Anthropic’s three, Perplexity’s two, Common Crawl, Meta’s two, Mistral, DuckDuckGo, Amazon, ByteDance, and the Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended control tokens, all allowed everything. It grants nothing that was not already granted; what it fixes is that a crawler reads exactly one group and never merges it with *, so a Disallow: added to * in future would have silently exempted every one of them. The file records that it is only half the policy: Cloudflare can refuse an AI crawler at the edge before the Worker is reached, so the check is a request wearing the agent’s own name, and the curl for it is in the file.
• The screenshot scripts take nothing from the person at the machine. packaging/signal_path.sh, packaging/app_window_shots.sh and packaging/ios/screenshots.sh used to bring the application and the Simulator to the front and post keys at them — the tab digit and the ⌘→ that turns the iPad — so a run stole the focus from whoever was working, and was interrupted for it. They post nothing now: both applications open in the background with open -g, the tab is the --tab launch option, and the device’s orientation is checked and never set, because every way of turning it from a script works only while the Simulator is frontmost. A booted device is kept as it is, and a portrait one is refused with the menu path to use. The desktop window no longer has to be uncovered either: macOS reports a window visible while any part of it shows, which is the signal Flutter pauses on, and the shutter reads the window’s own image — so a corner showing from behind a browser is enough, and the run says how much showed.
• signal_path.sh shot a portrait iPad. It wrote SimulatorWindowOrientation and a rotation angle into the Simulator’s preferences and then pressed ⌘→, on the theory that the pair shapes the window and the key turns the device; present, the pair pins the device so that nothing turns it, and the press went unchecked. The keys are removed before launch, as the iPad script does.
• ODR is at 1.1. § 6.4 permits the AES names beside the specification’s own and asks an implementation to say which it prints; § 2 cites the current AES document, TD1008, and the 2017 convention paper that proposed PSR, in place of the superseded TD1004; and § 8’s PSR / PLR row no longer claims the AES leaves the peak open — it does say true peak. What it leaves open, and the specification pins, is the channel, the window’s alignment, the gate, the statistic and the display. No operand moved and every conformance case reads as before.
• The wire has a 0x0006 DYNAMICS_NAMING frame, host to client, carrying the names as settings.json spells them. Added under protocol version 5 without moving it: it changes no table, and a display that predates it skips it by length and prints the default, which is what a host that predates the setting prints too. docs/WIRE.md says so.
• The website has photographs of the application’s own window — the Loudness tab and the Spectrum tab, chrome included — taken by packaging/app_window_shots.sh and encoded by npm run window. Nothing on the site showed the tab strip, the file name, the menu row or the status bar: the hero still is a Flutter web build with no window around it, the module thumbnails are one module each, and the signal-path plate shows the window mid-publish because that is what its section is about. Each is a session of the fake DAW playing a real track through the real VST3, so every reading in them is one the engine took.
• packaging/ios/screenshots.sh no longer touches the pointer. The App Store set is three pictures now — the Loudness tab, the Spectrum tab, and the Loudness tab in the Daylight skin — and nothing with screen coordinates is posted to take them: the tab is the application’s own digit binding sent as a key, the skin is written into the app’s settings.json before the launch that photographs it, and the rotation is a key whose effect is read back off the Simulator’s window bounds and retried until the device is on its side. The old five posted mouse clicks at coordinates read off a finished screenshot, which drifted twice and pressed the wrong controls without failing; the delivery-target, module-library and remote-display pictures are gone with them.
• Every photograph is committed. packaging/ios/screenshots/ holds the App Store set, packaging/android/screenshots/ the Play Store set, and packaging/screenshots/ the website’s four plates — the signal-path pair and the two window shots — and the four scripts write there now rather than into build/packaging/, which a clean deletes. Nothing in CI can take these pictures — they need a fake DAW, a simulator or an emulator, and a person’s grants — so unlike an installer they could not be rebuilt from nothing.
• The Windows engine job no longer fails about one run in four. The reclaiming orphans tests called oaa_engine_reset_all, which destroys every live engine in the process — and dart test runs its suites as isolates inside one process, four of which create engines. So the reset reached into whichever sibling suite was running and freed engines it still held, and the job died with an access violation inside the engine library. The three cases now run as a program in a process of their own. Nothing the engine does was wrong and no measurement changes; the test was.
• website/tools/oaa_replay has a test suite, run by the checks job. That package is not a workspace member, so flutter analyze never reached it and the only thing that read it at all was dart format.

0.15.0 — 2026-08-29

📐 Measurement

• Correlation and Balance are now gated at −70 LUFS and read as a dash under it, where they read 0 before. Both divide by the two channels’ energy, so with nothing there they are 0/0 and 0 was a reading nobody took. Correlation was the visible half: its 200 ms smoother approaches a target asymptotically and never arrives, so a substituted 0 left the published value carrying the sign of the last audio for as long as the silence lasted. A track that fades out on a wide reverb tail ends slightly out of phase, and the Phase Scope then held its correlation marker off centre and lit it in the warning colour — asserting anti-phase content in a signal that had stopped — for the twenty-odd seconds the exponential took to underflow. The line is R128’s own absolute gate, per channel: correlation needs both channels above it and balance needs either, so a hard-panned source now reports a balance and no correlation. A gate rather than a guard against dividing by zero, because a live input is never exactly zero — it sits on a converter’s noise floor, whose correlation is a random number near zero whose sign falls whichever way the block did, and an idle desk reported those as readings. An offline report’s correlation range and mean now describe the programme rather than the file: a master with silence or room tone at either end no longer reports a minimum of 0.00 it never reached, and its mean is no longer pulled towards zero by however much of the file is lead-in and tail. An Alert Meter on either metric no longer latches silence. Re-run a report for the corrected range and mean; nothing about the audio itself changed, no reading above the gate moved, and a mono source still reports +1 and 0, which is true rather than substituted.
• A true-peak ceiling is no longer passed by silence. True peak max is a running maximum, so unlike the gated readings it carries a number from the first block — the −144 dB floor every level is clamped to — and that number satisfies every ceiling a target states. Both places a verdict is given said so: the Validator printed -144.0 … PASS for an idle input, the one green line on a table whose every other row was still waiting, and the delivery report’s true-peak check passed for a file with no programme in it. A true peak at the floor now reads as not measured in both. No measured value changes and no verdict changes where a programme exists — anything above the −70 LUFS gate puts true peak above the floor — so this can only turn a vacuous pass into a dash, and no re-measure is warranted. oaa’s exit code is unaffected: a file with nothing in it already failed to be compliant on LUFS-I.
• An Alert Meter on Crest now holds the most squashed block of a session rather than the most open one. Crest is sample peak minus RMS, so a high reading is a dynamic passage and a low one is a limited passage — and the module held the maximum, printing the best moment of a programme as the worst of it. The same defect the two dynamics ratios had through 0.14.0. Balance is now held by distance from centre rather than by signed value, so a mix pulled hard left registers where before only a right-leaning one could. Neither metric is judged against a target, so neither reading was ever coloured — what changes is which number is held, by however far the session swung.
• An Alert Meter on ODR-I, LUFS-I, LRA, TP Max or Peak Max now prints what the engine holds, rather than the most extreme value that reading passed through. Those five are accumulated over the programme since the last reset, and three of them converge rather than climb — so the module was latching an artefact of the first seconds. ODR-I is TP Max − LUFS-I, and integrated loudness clears the −70 LUFS absolute gate while a track is still room tone: on a 322-second master whose ODR-I is 8.6 LU, the reading swung between 33.5 and 7.6 inside the first second and the module then printed 7.6 LU for the remaining five minutes — disagreeing with the Number Box beside it, with the Validator and with the delivery report, and lit red under a floor the programme cleared. LUFS-I had the same failure on any programme that starts louder than it ends. Readings on those five change by however far the swing went; nothing else in the application reported them and no re-measure is warranted. The nine metrics measured moment by moment — momentary and short-term loudness, the live true peak, ODR-S, crest, correlation, balance and the two per-channel levels — still latch their worst, which is what the module is for.
• The two dynamics readings are Open Dynamic Range: ODR-S and ODR-I. They were PSR and PLR, and also DR-S and DR-I — four names for two numbers. The arithmetic is unchanged and every reading that was defined before reads the same number now; what is new is the name and the written standard behind it, in docs/METRICS.md and the README, which pins every operand the AES note leaves open. A preset with a Number Box or an Alert Meter on any of the four old ids opens on the same reading under its current name; the JSON report carries odr_i where it carried plr.
• ODR-S is undefined in silence and below the −70 LUFS absolute gate, rather than a number. It read 0.0 LU for digital silence — true peak and short-term loudness both floor at −144 dB, and a subtraction of two floors is zero — and about 8 LU for a noise floor at −90 dBFS: a dynamics figure for a passage with no programme in it. It now reads as a dash there, on the same line below which LUFS-I is not defined, and is unchanged by any amount above the gate — a reading that was defined before reads the same number now. No re-measure is warranted; a Number Box or Alert Meter watching ODR-S through a silent gap shows a dash where it showed 0.0, and nothing else changes. ODR-I is unaffected, having always been undefined for as long as LUFS-I is.
• The two dynamics readings are held in CI. A stereo 1 kHz sine reads an ODR-S and an ODR-I of 0.0 LU and the same tone in mono reads 3.01; the numerator is asserted to be true peak, against a signal whose every sample sits 3 dB under its own waveform; and silence and a −80 dBFS tone read as undefined. The definition, operand by operand, is now in docs/METRICS.md and the README.
• The spectrum is measured on five signals. Beside the combined bands — the loudest bin across every channel, unchanged — the engine publishes the front pair’s Left, Right, Mid (L + R) / 2 and Side (L − R) / 2 spectra, each with its own peak hold, and holds them against sines of known amplitude: a hard-left sine reads its full level on Left, −6.02 dB on Mid and on Side and the floor on Right; an in-phase one its full level on Mid and the floor on Side; an anti-phase one the reverse. On a one-channel source Right, Mid and Side are not measured rather than reported as the channel twice. Nothing previously reported changes.
• The Histogram records a column every 50 ms, where it recorded one every 100 ms. Its short-term line is unchanged to within the width of the stroke — a 3 s window does not move in 50 ms — but its momentary band is a maximum over the column, so a shorter column can only lower it: the band’s top now reads up to a few tenths of an LU below where it did on transient material, and exactly where it did on steady material. The reading it is drawn from is unchanged, and no re-measure is warranted; what changed is how finely the module samples it, which is what makes zooming in show anything.
• LUFS-M and LUFS-S are clamped at the −144 dB floor, which they were not. Both floored their reading by testing it against −infinity, which is what an energy of exactly zero produces and nothing else does. A window that has just emptied holds something else: the K-weighting filters ring on after the signal stops, so a window carrying nothing but that tail has an energy of around 1e-90, and it was published faithfully as −1,860 LUFS. The reading then fell further for as long as the ringing took to age out of the window, and jumped back up to −144.0 at the moment the last of it left — a second later for momentary, three for short-term. Those figures reached the wire and the JSON report as well as the meters. Both readings now clamp the way every other dB quantity in the engine already did. Nothing audible is affected: the excursion starts below −144 LUFS and only in the seconds after a signal stops, so no reading of programme material moves and no re-measure is warranted.
• The Spectrogram records every published measurement. One column is one publish, but the record advanced when the module was repainted, and repaints are throttled to the meter frame rate — so at 30 fps, and under the platform’s reduce-motion preference, one publish in three never reached the record at all and a transient that fell in a skipped one was simply absent from the picture. The record is now advanced from the unthrottled measurement, so the display is the same at 30, 60 and 120 fps and holds every band the engine published. Nothing about how a level is measured or coloured changed; what changed is how much of the signal reaches the display.

✨ Added

• The Spectrum Analyzer has a cursor. Click or tap anywhere on the plot and a line stands at that frequency with a tag beside it: the frequency, the level there, its peak hold, and the level in dB(A). Drag the line to move it; tap it, or click anywhere away from the module, to dismiss it. The two levels are read off the curve and the hold at that band — the lines the cursor crosses — and are the measured values, untilted, so under a Tilt the tag reads the true level where the axis cannot. dB(A) is the band’s level plus the IEC 61672-1 A-weighting curve at its centre frequency, which is exact for a single band and is the one weighted reading in the application; the curve itself stays unweighted. A right click on the plot is still the module’s menu, and a click still selects the module.
• The Oscilloscope’s overlaid channels can be swapped front to back. Two traces around one centre line hide one another wherever they cross, and the right channel was always the dimmed one behind — so it was the one you could not read. The L R legend is now the control: it sits at the left of the slider row, names the front channel first and in the brighter ink, and clicking it puts the other one in front. It is remembered in the layout.
• The Histogram scrolls and zooms. The overview strip along its floor was a map of the recording; it is now the control as well. Drag the frame on it and the plot scrolls back through the programme — it keeps recording while you look, and dragging the frame back against the right-hand edge re-attaches it to the newest reading. Scroll, pinch or wheel over the strip — a trackpad, a Magic Mouse and a click-wheel mouse all reach it — and the frame resizes, which is the plot’s zoom: anything from five seconds across the module to the whole seven minutes the ring holds.
• A Validator chooses which criteria it judges. Checks in its menu, one row per delivery criterion, ticked and unticked in a menu that stays open — every other menu in the application closes on the tap that chooses, and choosing four of five that way is four trips through a right click. A criterion switched off leaves the verdict as well as the table, which is the point: a NOT READY that is really “the LRA of a podcast is 4 LU” is a red light people learn to ignore. A module with nothing left to check says NOTHING CHECKED rather than READY TO DELIVER. Existing presets are unchanged — a Validator that has never been told otherwise checks everything the target states — and a dynamics floor the target does not set is greyed in the menu rather than dropped from it.
• The Alert Meter chooses what it watches. Metric in its menu, the row a Number Box has always had: the three readings a delivery is decided by are LUFS-I, LRA and true peak max, and any of the fourteen metrics works. The metric was stored in the preset, read and drawn the whole time — there was nowhere to choose it, so every Alert Meter ever placed watched true peak.
• The Alert Meter can print the distance from the target instead of the reading. Delta in its menu: +0.6 where the module showed −0.4 dBTP against a −1.0 ceiling, signed so that positive is always above the line whichever way the comparison runs, and in the unit of the difference — dB from a peak ceiling, LU from a loudness target. The latch and the colours are decided from the measurement either way, so a module in delta turns red at the same moment and agrees with the one beside it that is not. A metric the target draws no line for — and an ODR floor this target does not state — reads as a dash rather than as a distance from nothing.
• A delivery target can set an ODR-I floor and an ODR-S floor. odr_i_min and odr_s_min in the target’s file, or the two rows of the editor’s new Dynamics section — the limits that run the other way, and the ones no platform publishes; of the built-ins only Dynamic master carries one. Each floor the target sets adds a line to the Validator, the report, the report card and the oaa verdict, and a master limited past one fails a build the way one over its peak ceiling does. The ODR-S line is judged against the lowest ODR-S of the programme — the most squeezed three seconds — which is the check ODR-I cannot make, because one transient in a quiet intro rescues a flattened chorus. The Validator keeps that minimum since the last reset.
• The Open Dynamic Range specification, docs/ODR.md, published at open-audio-analyzer.com/docs/odr: the two readings defined to the operand — the peak, the window, the gate, the minimum, the display — with seven conformance cases, every one a generated signal with a stated tolerance, and a table of what ODR is and is not beside the AES ratios, TrueDyn, DR, LRA and crest. Normative and versioned; its text is CC BY 4.0 so another product’s documentation may reproduce it.
• The specification says what a reading means. Annex A, informative: the identity that a normalised master’s true peak is the platform’s target plus its ODR-I, the bands from flat to wide with an arithmetic anchor on every row, the published 8 LU floor for the minimum ODR-S, and why the TT DR scale’s thresholds do not transfer. Kept apart from the definition so the guidance can be revised without a version bump. The bands are also in the README’s ODR section and, drawn to scale, under the website’s Dynamics section.
• Dynamic master is a seventh built-in delivery target — the streaming target’s loudness and peak lines plus the one floor with a published source: 8 LU on the minimum ODR-S, Ian Shepherd’s recommendation for the loudest passage in any genre. The one built-in that is a recommendation rather than a platform, and its note says so.
• The text report prints ODR-I’s band word after the reading — 12.8 LU (balanced) — the bands of ODR Annex A, flat to wide, in the app’s export and the CLI’s alike. The word appears in the human format alone; the JSON stays numbers, so nothing a script gates on changed.
• A file report states the lowest ODR-S reached, where it was defined, as its ODR-S line and as odr_s_min in the JSON — beside ODR-I, which is one peak against the whole programme.
• The Super Meter prints ODR-I under its LRA readout, in the verdict’s colour when the target has a floor.
• A connected DAW plugin is an entry in the source picker, named after the host it is running in — DAW plugin — Logic Pro — in the status bar’s menu and in Settings › Signal. Several inserts are several rows. The selection is remembered between launches, so a machine that meters a DAW every day opens ready for one.
• The Spectrum Analyzer and the Spectrogram have a Source setting — All, Left, Right, Mid or Side — as the first row of their menus. It is part of the module, so it is saved with the preset and a tablet shows the host’s choice; changing the spectrogram’s clears its record, because a picture that is one signal on the left and another on the right is a measurement nobody took. A source the signal cannot provide says MONO SOURCE.
• The Spectrum Analyzer has a Range setting — 60, 90 or 120 dB below full scale, 90 by default, the values and the default Pro-Q uses — as the last row of its menu. The dB axis is linear over the chosen range, labelled every 6, 10 or 12 dB, and the range is printed in the plot’s top-right corner, opposite the tilt.

⚡ Changed

• Clicking anywhere outside the selected module clears the selection. Only a click on empty canvas did, and only on the release; a click on the menu bar, the tab strip or the status bar left the module outlined, because nothing on the canvas could see it. The selection now lets go on the press, wherever it lands — empty canvas, the bars, another module — with one exception: a module’s own menu, and any panel standing open, are not “elsewhere”, so choosing an option for a module leaves it selected, and the click that closes its menu does too.
• A level standing at the dB floor now reads -∞ rather than -144.0. Every dB level is clamped to −144 before it leaves the engine, so that is a sentinel and not a reading: printed to four significant figures it was precise, plausible and measured by nobody, and it disagreed on screen with the meter beside it, whose scale labels that same end -∞ already. Every level readout in the application changes together — the Number Boxes, the LUFS Meter, the Digital Meter’s peak and RMS rows, the Super Meter’s centre, the Validator’s table and the oaa text report — because all of them format through one function. Ranges and differences are untouched: LRA, Crest, ODR-S and ODR-I are subtractions of two levels and never reach the clamp. Silence is a measurement, so it is -∞ and not the em dash that marks a quantity nobody measured. The snapshot, the wire protocol and the JSON report still carry −144.0.
• The Super Meter’s three centre sections stand apart. The short-term pair, the integrated pair and the true peak were packed at a fixed eight pixels while the lower part of the dial’s clear disc stood empty, because the stack is sized by the width a row has to fit across and the height it did not need simply went unspent. It is divided between the two gaps now. The figures are the size they always were, and on a small module the ceiling’s printed value yields to the true peak row rather than crowd it — the red zone and its tick still mark where the ceiling is.
• The Loudness Distribution prints its LRA in the caliper’s grey rather than in the accent. The number sits between the two marks of the dimension line that measures it, and in the signal hue it read as a separate label that happened to be collinear with them rather than as part of the annotation. The reading is unchanged; only its ink is.
• The Super Meter’s dynamics arcs end in nothing. ODR-S and ODR-I each ran into a grey radial tick at the true peak, which put a third mark on a dial whose other two — the target and the ceiling — are values somebody set. Where the arc stops still says where the peak stands, and the number itself is printed in the centre.
• The LUFS Meter’s overshoot is the same solid as the bar under it. The stretch standing above the delivery target was flat paint laid over a bar that is modelled across its width, so it read as a cap sitting on the meter rather than as the top of the reading. It now carries that same modelling in the same red: a bar crossing the target changes colour and nothing else.
• A new Alert Meter watches the live true peak rather than TP Max. Both print the same number — the largest three-second peak of a session is that session’s peak — but only one of them is the module doing its job: TP Max is held by the engine, so an Alert Meter on it read rather than latched, and the module shipped with the one behaviour it exists for switched off. The name above the digits reads TRUE PEAK where it read TP MAX. An Alert Meter already on the canvas, or in a saved preset, keeps the metric it was given.
• The Oscilloscope’s time base and overlaid legend moved onto the control row. Both were printed over the corners of the waveform. The legend is now at the left of the row, ahead of the height slider, and the time base at its right-hand end, under the axis it measures. A module too narrow to hold both beside the sliders, and a tablet showing a remote canvas, draw them in the corners as before; the lane letters are unchanged, because a lane’s letter belongs in its lane.
• Every number a module prints is the signal hue. Readings were white — the same ink as a menu label, a panel’s body text and the module’s own title — so the one thing a meter exists to show was the colour of the chrome around it. A value now carries the accent whether or not a target applies to it, and the palette’s other colours say what is wrong with one: amber approaching a limit, red past it, a muted em dash for a quantity nobody measured. The Digital Meter’s peak and RMS rows, the VU Meter’s readout, the LUFS Meter’s momentary and short-term values, the Loudness Distribution’s LRA, the Number Box, the Alert Meter, the Super Meter’s centre and the Validator’s table all move together; nothing on a module borrows the hue that is not a measurement. One consequence worth knowing: a reading under its target and a reading in spec are now the same colour, and the verdict is the Validator’s, the Alert Meter’s and the delivery report’s to state in words.
• The Validator colours a row by its own verdict. The measured value and the Δ beside it take the accent when the row passes, the over colour when it fails, and the muted dash while the measurement is still undefined — so the table can be read at a glance rather than only when something is wrong.
• Every module’s panel is lit from its top-left corner, the way Decibel’s are: a soft highlight, brightest in the corner behind the title and fading back to the panel colour four fifths of the way across and down. The panel was one flat colour. Skins carry it with no new colour role — the light is the skin’s own panel colour lifted — and a light skin, whose panel is already near white, is barely lit at all.
• The Histogram’s time axis is elapsed time — 45s, 1m15s — where it was the wall-clock time a column was recorded at. A clock is only right while the plot is pinned to the newest column: now that it scrolls, one counting back from the present would label a chorus four minutes ago with the time you are looking at it. The gridlines are pinned to the programme rather than to the edge of the plot, so they slide with the material instead of renumbering themselves.
• The Histogram’s momentary band is drawn at a weight you can see. It was 0.05 to 0.26 alpha under a fill that reaches 0.85, which put the gap between the two bands — the whole reading — below the noise floor of the display it was drawn on. The short-term edge is still the strongest line on the module.
• The Histogram’s overview strip sits a full gutter below the plot rather than four pixels, and the frame on it is filled as well as outlined, so it reads as something to grab rather than as the plot’s own bottom margin.
• The Alert Meter’s reading is labelled with the metric’s own name. It read WORST TP MAX, which labelled the only thing the module does — the title bar above it already says which module this is, and the digits and the panel’s light are now one held verdict, so nothing on the tile reads as a live value for the word to correct.
• The Alert Meter’s panel is washed in light off its left edge, in the colour of the worst reading it has caught. It replaces a two-pixel rule down that edge — the same statement in a hundredth of the area, a gutter inside the panel’s own edge, on the one module built to be read from across a room and out of the corner of an eye. It is the Number Box’s glow turned on its side, and one shader draws both. The light and the digits are one verdict in two sizes: both are decided from the latch, both are cleared by the engine’s reset and by any setting that changes what the module is showing, so a red panel across the room and the number on it can never disagree. A module that has caught nothing is not lit at all.
• A Number Box and an Alert Meter with no reading are no longer lit. The wash under the digits is a verdict on a number, and an em dash — nothing measured yet, a link gone quiet, a quantity this build does not compute — has none. It glowed in the accent, which is the colour that means “measured, and nothing says it is wrong”, so a module that had measured nothing at all looked like one that was fine.
• The Validator’s Δ is printed at the size of the number it marks rather than at a graticule tick’s, which read as a superscript on the reading to its left instead of as the label of the one to its right.
• The Alert Meter shows the worst reading and no longer the live one. The big number was the live value with the latch a small line beneath it, which made this a Number Box carrying a footnote — and the canvas already has a Number Box that says the live value better. The latch is now the module’s one number, at the size the live one had, under the metric’s own name — and the panel’s light is that same held verdict, so nothing on the module reads as live. Nothing stopped being measured: the live reading is read every frame and it is what the latch is taken from. It is simply no longer what the module prints.
• The Alert Meter prints the unit after its reading, and sets its label in the grey the Number Box uses for its own name and unit rather than in the fainter one a graticule tick gets. In Delta the unit is the difference’s — +0.8 dB under a dBTP ceiling, −0.6 LU from a loudness target — because the reference cancels in a subtraction and +0.8 dBTP would name a clipped master rather than eight tenths of a decibel over the line.
• A source can be changed while a plugin is connected. A plugin used to take the canvas for as long as it was connected, which left every input on the machine unreachable until it was removed from the DAW — the app asked the link what it was showing rather than asking the selection. The first plugin to connect still selects itself, because inserting it is the act of choosing it; a second insert no longer takes the canvas off a source somebody has chosen, and neither does re-instantiating one.
• Choosing a DAW releases the capture device. Nothing local is being metered while a plugin is on the canvas, and the microphone stayed open behind it — a recording indicator lit on the machine’s own menu bar for a window showing a DAW.
• The DAW plugin chosen with none connected reads as dashes rather than as a measured silence, with a line at the top of the window saying so. That is the state a remembered selection opens in when the app is started before the DAW.
• The status bar names a plugin session DAW PLUGIN — LOGIC PRO rather than OPEN AUDIO ANALYZER PLUGIN — LOGIC PRO. The wire is unchanged and a producer still names itself in full; what was dropped is this application’s own name, inside this application, where it was the half of the row that survived the chip’s 220 px ellipsis.
• The status bar prints no sample rate and channel count when nothing has reported one, instead of 0.0 kHz · 0 ch.
• Every level scale is tapered, with −∞ at its floor. The dB scales were linear; the top decade now takes most of the track — the filled fraction is 10^(dB/60) — the labelled ticks crowd the top, and the bottom of a track means silence rather than “−48, or quieter, who knows”. One taper for the whole application, so two meters side by side still agree about where −12 is. The Spectrum Analyzer is the one level axis that is not tapered: a range setting on a taper would move nothing but the bottom tenth of the plot, so its axis is linear over the Range it is set to.
• The LUFS Meter draws three bars — momentary, short-term, integrated — with their values printed beneath. Integrated was a line across the other two and its number sat in a readout row; the bars now carry their names up their own faces, the scale is labelled on both edges, and the target line is dashed in the over colour with the target value printed on the axis. The LRA readout moved off this module; it stays on the Loudness Distribution, the Validator and any Number Box.
• The Super Meter is a half-gauge on which loudness and dynamics meet at the true peak. Short-term and integrated LUFS fill from the left end; ODR-S and ODR-I continue from each loudness tip on the same dB scale as thinner arcs, ending at the true peak with a grey tick, so the dark rest of a ring is its true-peak headroom — a dynamics arc reaching the right end is a peak at 0 dBTP. LUFS-S and ODR-S ride the outer ring’s tips as engraved names and nothing else is printed on the rings; with nothing measured both rest together at the silent end, since a name parked at the other end of an empty dial reads as a tip standing at full scale; the delivery ceiling is a red zone at the right end with its value on a tick, the target keeps its tick with the value beside it, and the centre prints five readings in three rows — LUFS-S and ODR-S small on top, in the accent and judged by nothing, LUFS-I and ODR-I under them in their verdict colours, TRUE PEAK below — every one of the five printing its unit beside it and every row labelled with its reading’s full name rather than under an INTEGRATED heading, and a module too small for three rows keeps the two that are delivered. It printed every arc’s reading in the lane beside it and LRA as a fourth row for part of this cycle, and read as crowded; the short-term pair also spent a day cut into its arcs, where an upright figure clips to a sliver whenever a tip stands near the dial’s vertical ends.
• The Super Meter’s arcs arrive from the silent end. A reading that has just become defined — LUFS-S and ODR-S three seconds after a reset or the start of a song, LUFS-I and ODR-I after the first gated block — used to put its arc into the middle of the dial at once, which read as a glitch. The arc now starts at the left end and sweeps to its value over about half a second, then follows the reading as before. The numbers in the centre are unchanged and show the measurement from the first frame.
• The three level meters are drawn in a darker shade of the skin’s accent, deepening towards the floor. The LUFS Meter’s bars, the Digital Meter’s bars and the Super Meter’s loudness arcs are the accent at 70 % of its lightness at the reading; they were the grey meter_fill, a step above the grey track, and read as a level you had to look for. Down each fill the ink runs flat for the top three tenths and then to a floor colour that is the ink fully saturated and darker, in the same hue — the ramp measured off Decibel’s bars, whose floor is a deeper colour rather than a shaded one. The one gradient before it dimmed from the reading downward and reached its darkest only a full scale below it, so a bar at two thirds of its track was one flat colour with a lit edge. The LUFS Meter’s bars are also shaded across their width as tubes, a little darker at both edges on the reference’s curve, tightened towards the edges so that the middle of a bar — the strip a name is printed up — carries the ink undimmed. The Super Meter’s arcs carry the same ramp swept around the dial, where they were flat. Both colours are derived from accent rather than new skin roles, so a skin that sets its accent gets meters to match; meter_fill still colours the VU needle and the report’s bars, so a skin that sets it is unaffected there.
• The Super Meter’s loudness arcs keep their colour past the target. The part of an arc standing past the target tick was redrawn in red; it is now the arc’s own ink to its tip, and the tick alone marks the target — a ring that turned red at its tip was a warning laid over a level, on a gauge whose centre already prints the verdict. The LUFS Meter’s bars, the Histogram and the Loudness Distribution still cut to red at the target.
• The Digital Meter prints peak and RMS per channel above the bars. The bars are lit as segments under one gradient, the peak mark warms from the fill colour to red as it nears full scale, and the fixed top-of-scale warning region is gone — the mark that is actually hot carries the warning.
• The Digital Meter lights whole segments only. Its bars were drawn to the measurement with the segment gaps laid over them, so the row at the top of a column was whatever fraction of a segment the reading landed on — less ink than every row under it, which reads as the paint thinning out rather than as a level — and the peak was a two-pixel hairline free to sit across a gap between two rows. A column now stops at the top of the last row it fills completely, and the peak is one whole lit row on the same grid, so what stands between the two is a whole number of segments. The scale is ruled on that grid too: its gridlines were drawn on their exact values, which put a line through the middle of a segment as often as not — a second ruling beating against the first — and each one now stands in the segment gap nearest its value, at most two pixels from where it was, with its label moved to match. A labelled value is one of the meter’s own gaps in a lighter grey, so the scale reads across a lit bar as well as an empty one, where before it was covered by the fill. The column’s resolution is one row; the peak and RMS printed above it are unchanged and carry the measurement itself, rounded by nothing.
• The Histogram’s time axis is wall-clock time, and an overview strip along its floor shows the whole recording with a frame over the slice the plot is showing. The momentary band is tinted by how far over target each column stands, from the accent into the over colour.
• The Spectrum Analyzer’s frequency labels moved to the top of the plot and cover the 1-2-3-5-7 series from 20 Hz to 20 kHz; the dB labels moved to the left and run over the chosen Range rather than a fixed 96 dB; the tilt caption sits inset in the plot’s top-left corner, with the range in the top-right. The setting is unchanged.
• The Spectrogram gained its axes: frequency labels ticked down the left, time along the top. Nothing is drawn over the field itself.
• The Phase Scope is a square goniometer, with balance riding its bottom edge and correlation its right edge as markers — the correlation marker in the warning colour below zero, as the bar it replaces was — and L, R and M engraved at the ends of the axes they name. The correlation bar under the plot is gone. On a mono source the markers are withheld beside the notice, as the bar was.
• The Number Box names its metric inside the body and glows at its foot in the reading’s verdict colour, out to the panel’s own edges and fading over four fifths of its height whatever shape the module has been given.
• Every Validator row prints the signed distance between its reading and the limit that judges it, beside the limit.
• The VU Meter wears the standard face — labelled −20 −10 −7 −5 −3 −1 0 +1 +2 with the pin at +3 and − and + at the ends, a peak lamp that lights while the held peak stands over 0 VU, and its reading in a box under the needle. The machined hub is gone; the needle wears the instrument colour.
• The VU Meter prints a dash when the programme is below the bottom of its scale, in the muted voice every unreported quantity wears, rather than <-20 in the colour of a measurement. The two signs ran together into a mark that read as a left arrow, and a needle resting on its stop was printed with the weight of a figure the programme had made. The two states are still distinct on the face: below the scale the needle is there, on its bottom stop; unmeasured, there is no needle at all.
• The VU Meter’s peak lamp is set into the face, under the end of the red and inside the rim, rather than pinned to the right edge of the tile at half the face’s height — where it was level with nothing, attached to nothing, and read as a stray dot beside the instrument. It scales with the dial, and gives way to the reading on a tile too small for both.
• The VU Meter’s face says which way it runs more plainly: the − and + past the last marks are larger, the − is grey rather than in the accent colour — it was the one teal thing on an instrument that has no other — and 0 is red like the numbers above it, on the heaviest tick of the scale, because 0 is where the red begins.
• The Super Meter’s ends are square again, and every printed value on it wears its arc’s own ink — the integrated tip value is neutral past the target, the way its arc is — so the one red number on the dial is the target’s.
• The Stereo Cloud is a field of marks, not an accumulation. Each published frame contributes one diamond per band that stands out of the mix, brighter and larger the louder, and the last two seconds of those are drawn, fading with age; a bass band drifting off centre leaves a ribbon. It accumulated into a grid before, where every band a few decibels down the mix added a little forty times a second and the field filled edge to edge. Marks sit at the pan pot’s angle the balance implies rather than at the power balance itself, which is steepest at the centre — a three-decibel lean is a fifth of the way over now, not a third — and only the top 30 dB of a frame place a mark, cubed, so the picture is the bands that matter. Its frequency scale sits in a gutter beside the field and L, C, R in a strip below it, both outside the box around the field, as Decibel lays it out.
• Six modules are boxed. The Spectrum Analyzer, the Oscilloscope, the Spectrogram, the Histogram — twice, once round the plot and once round the overview strip along its floor — the Loudness Distribution and the Stereo Cloud each draw a hairline box around their picture, in the same ink as the gridlines inside it. They ruled whichever one or two sides a scale happened to sit against, in whatever weight looked right there, and a rule that stops where the picture stops on two sides of four reads as an unfinished box rather than as an edge. The box is drawn around the picture rather than over it, so the newest column of a spectrogram and the newest sample of a scope — both hard against the right-hand edge — are framed instead of hidden under a hairline; each plot gives up a pixel on every side to make room.
• A Spectrogram’s floor is the panel it is drawn on. The skin ramp’s level 0 was an opaque copy of the panel colour, which was the same pixel until a module’s panel stopped being flat: it now carries a light across its top-left corner, and a field painted in the unlit colour cut a rectangle out of it and read as a lid laid over the module. Cells the signal reached are unchanged — the ramp’s colours are the same colours, composited rather than mixed — and the Full RGB ramp still declares and paints its own near-black ground.
• The Phase Scope fills its module. It reserved the label band on all four sides to stay centred as a square; the figure with its two label bands is what is centred now, and the square is a quarter taller for it.
• The three frequency axes label by one rule. Every value of the 20-30-50-70 series that fits is labelled, 100 Hz, 1 kHz and 10 kHz first, on the analyser’s top edge and down the spectrogram’s and the cloud’s sides alike; two of the three fell back to three labels the moment one pair was tight, so a spectrogram beside a cloud carried three where the cloud carried ten.
• The Histogram’s overview strip runs edge to edge and spans the recording so far — the whole ring once it has filled — rather than the ring’s capacity, which put a session’s first minute in a sliver at the right end beside seven blank ones.
• The Loudness Distribution’s target line is the over colour, like every other target mark, with its value under the axis in the same, and it stops at the picture: the fill is already split at the target, so the dashes now run only through the clear space above the distribution and no longer through it.
• The wire protocol is version 5. A snapshot carries the four extra spectra and their peak holds as eight more fixed-point arrays before the scope run, which takes a one-block frame from 7,652 to 15,844 bytes — at the default 30 Hz display link about 250 kB/s more, a few percent of what a tablet’s Wi-Fi carries. A version-5 display still reads a version-4 plugin, reporting the four sources as not measured; a version-4 display refuses a version-5 host at the handshake, on payload size, with the sentence naming both numbers. Decoding is keyed to the frame’s version rather than its length, because a long version-4 relay frame can be the size of a version-5 one. docs/WIRE.md is the specification.
• The LUFS Meter’s bar names are set to the module. MOMENTARY, SHORT and INTEGRATED were written up the bars at one fixed 10 px whatever the module’s own size, so on a small module the word filled a narrow bar edge to edge and read as a label of the meter rather than as one written on a bar. The face is now a base plus a share of the track’s height — 6 px to 12 px, held under what the bar’s width and the track’s length will carry — so a module resized down takes its names with it and one resized up sets them a little larger. The default five-cell module lands where it always was. The single letters under the bars are still the fallback, now for a bar too narrow to carry a word rather than for a module too short.
• A LUFS Meter bar is lit down its centre line, and shaded far less at its edges. The fill was shaded at both sides and left at the ink in the middle; the middle is now lifted instead, and the shading at the sides is under a third of what it was — on the accent and on the red above the target alike — so a bar reads as a round solid rather than as a bar in a box. The two go together: with the middle lit, a hard edge as well gave the bar more range across its width than down its height, and the top edge, which is the reading, stopped being the first thing the eye found. The stretch above the target takes the lighter edges and no centre light. No other module changes — the LUFS Meter is the only one whose fill is shaded across its width at all.

🐛 Fixed

• A meter with nothing to show no longer leaves a hairline of fill at the foot of its track. The level scale is tapered and its bottom is −∞, which no finite reading reaches — but the floor every dB quantity is clamped to is −144.0, a finite number, and the taper puts that four tenths of one percent up the track rather than at the end of it. So digital silence drew a line of lit accent a pixel or two tall along the bottom of every bar, seconds after the music stopped. A reading at or below the floor now sits where the scale labels it, at −∞. The LUFS Meter is where it was reported; the Digital Meter and the Super Meter’s arcs are drawn on the same scale and had the same hairline.
• The LUFS Meter’s bars no longer change height while the readings fall. The row of numbers under the bars was fitted to whatever string was printed at that moment, and the bars stand on that row — so a reading below −100, which is one glyph wider, shortened all three bars, and at the size the module ships at it took the numbers under their legibility floor and removed them entirely until the reading passed. Every meter goes through that decade on its way down when the audio stops, so it showed up as a twitch each time. The row is now fitted to a fixed budget and only the digits themselves shrink to hold a longer number.
• The Phase Scope’s correlation marker and a Number Box on Correlation no longer paint a reading of -0.00 as anti-phase. The rule was the sign bit, and correlation prints two decimals — so a signal whose channels are simply unrelated sat dead centre and changed colour as the sign fell one way or the other, and a value a thousandth below zero was coloured like one at −0.9. The warning now starts at the first hundredth the reading actually prints, and both readouts go through one function so that two views of one number cannot disagree.
• An Alert Meter in Delta no longer reads an em dash for ever on ODR-S or ODR-I. Delta prints a reading as its distance from the line the target draws, and the two dynamics floors are the target’s to state: no built-in target states an ODR-I floor and only Dynamic master states an ODR-S one. The menu offered the setting anyway, on the metric alone, so switching it on under any other target — including the Streaming (−14 LUFS) the application starts with — left the module printing a dash from the first frame to the last, with a disabled menu row as its only way out. The row now follows the target as the Validator’s checks already did, and a stored delta a target cannot satisfy prints the reading itself rather than nothing. The choice is kept, not corrected: pick a target that states the floor and the distance comes back.
• The source menu no longer offers “Open Audio Analyzer System Capture”. Metering System Output on macOS builds a private Core Audio aggregate device to read the process tap through, and private means private to every application except this one — so the application listed its own plumbing as something to capture from, directly beneath the System Output entry that had created it. Selecting it read the tap back through a second path that was never designed. Enumeration now leaves out any aggregate this process built, matched by device UID rather than by name so that an aggregate of your own called the same thing is still offered.
• Save overwrites the preset it opened, on the next launch as well as this one. The session brought the layout back but not the file it came from, so the first ⌘S of a morning opened a save panel for a preset that already had a home — and the obvious answer, accepting the name the panel offered, wrote a second copy of it beside the first. session.json now records the open preset’s path, and the canvas adopts it on the way up: Save writes back to that file without asking, and only a layout that has never been saved, or Save as…, opens a panel. A remembered file that has since been renamed, deleted or left on an unmounted drive is dropped at launch, so Save asks where it should go rather than recreating it.
• The spectrogram’s age axis stands still, and stands in the same place on the next launch. The ticks and their labels were laid out from a rate re-derived on every published frame — one column is one measurement, and how long a column covers can only be measured — so they crept a pixel one way and back on every frame, worst in the first seconds after a module was mounted and never quite still afterwards. The rate is now adopted in steps of two per cent; a tick can stand up to that far from the age it is labelled with, which it always could.
• And the axis is the same picture every time the application starts. The first fix adopted whatever the first third of a second measured and then defended it for the rest of the session, which made the axis a photograph of the device’s spin-up: the engine’s clock advances in whole audio callbacks, so that early mean lands on one of a handful of quantised values depending on where the callbacks fell, and it was never corrected afterwards. Launches differing in nothing else spread 2.2 per cent, which at a 2 s rung puts the sixth tick anywhere in a 12 px band, and where the spread crossed the label-spacing threshold the rung itself flipped and the number of labels changed. The measured rate is now weighed against the rate on screen — including the nominal one it starts at — so an engine publishing within two per cent of nominal draws the identical axis on every launch, while a remote host at a genuinely different rate is still corrected to.
• The Spectrum Analyzer’s right-hand edge is one line rather than two. The frequency gridlines are drawn at band centres, so the top of the range — 20 kHz — sat half a band inside the plot’s own border, in the border’s colour and at its weight: on a module of ordinary width the two were adjacent and the right edge came out twice as thick as the other three, and on a wide one they separated into a rule standing beside the border. The gridline at each end of the range is now the border, which is where it was always trying to be.
• The Alert Meter drops what it has latched when it is asked to show something else. A different metric, Delta on or off, or a different delivery target each left the previous setting’s worst case standing: a true-peak maximum in dBTP printed under LUFS-I as the worst loudness of the programme, or a peak latched as over a −1.0 ceiling still red under a −2.0 one. Switching source does too — the desktop swaps its engine for a plugin’s the moment a DAW connects, and the two elapsed clocks have no relationship, so the reset the module already watched for could not see it.
• The spectrum analyser’s peak hold no longer carries across a change of Source. The line over Right was the maximum of Right and whatever Left had just been doing — standing at a level Right never reached and sinking towards the truth at twelve decibels a second. The curve reseats across a discontinuity of the clock for exactly this reason and a source change is not one; the spectrogram, reading the same bands from the same setting, has cleared its record on it since the setting existed. Tilt and Range still keep the hold, being views of the measurement rather than a different one.
• The oscilloscope no longer loses a block of audio whenever two measurements land inside one display tick. One picture — a waveform in bursts, with a gap between every pair — and two causes. The plugin’s streaming thread pushed every block a host buffer held and sent one snapshot per drain, so at a 2048-frame buffer every other block never left the DAW; it now sends every push. And every reader in the application took one snapshot per look while a snapshot carried only the newest block, so two publishes between two looks lost the first even once the plugin sent both — which also cost a third of the waveform at 88.2 kHz and above on a device, and a block whenever an engine caught up after a stall. Every source’s scope buffer is now a window of its newest four blocks, and a reader takes from it what the elapsed time says it is owed. Every other reading was right throughout, because those are integrals; nothing needs re-measuring.
• An Alert Meter watching ODR-S or ODR-I latches the lowest reading. It latched the highest — the most open moment of the session, printed as the worst of it — because every metric but correlation was taken to be worse when higher, and a ratio a floor is set under is the other way round.
• --open-panel=settings opens the settings panel again. It asserted “No RemoteDisplayScope in scope” and opened nothing, because the flag is acted on from a context above the scopes the panel needs — which is the debug build’s only way to put a panel on screen for review.
• The link preview card no longer says the project is part MIT. 0.14.0 made everything but the plugin GPL-3.0-or-later and the card was the one place that still carried the old split; it now reads GPL-3.0 · AGPL-3.0, as the site’s footer does.
• The Stereo Cloud is readable on dense material. Every band lit against a fixed floor, so real music filled every cell and the picture read as a wall of dots; bands now light relative to the loudest in the frame, and the cloud is sparse with a spine — which is the picture the module exists to show. Frequency gridlines, a C mark and the STEREO 1-2 caption landed with it.
• A skin change recolours every cached readout label and unit immediately; they kept the previous skin’s ink until their text next changed, which for a static label is never.
• The Digital Meter’s dB sits on the same baseline as PEAK, RMS and their values. The three faces in the row have three line heights, and top-aligned the unit floated above the reading it belongs to.
• The Spectrogram’s time axis no longer changes its spacing or its labelling while it runs. The ages along the top are labelled at the finest interval whose ticks stay legibly apart, and the interval was chosen by a bare comparison against a rate the display measures for itself. A column is one pixel and one publish, so that comparison falls on its threshold exactly at the ordinary rates — a 30 Hz remote host, a 60 Hz one, and any machine set to 30 fps — and the last digit of the estimate decided whether the axis read 2s 4s 6s or 5s 10s 15s. It landed one way on one launch and the other way on the next, and a rate correction mid-session relabelled the whole axis. The comparison now carries the tolerance the rate itself does, and the interval already on screen is kept on a looser threshold still, so every rate lands on the finest legible interval and stays there: a 30 Hz host reads 2s 4s 6s, a 60 Hz one 1s 2s 3s, and the local engine’s 47 Hz is unchanged at 2s 4s 6s.

🔥 Removed

• PSR, PLR, DR-S and DR-I as names, and plr and dr_i as keys of the JSON report. They were the two Open Dynamic Range readings under other spellings, and “DR” in particular is what the TT Dynamic Range Meter calls its number — a different measurement with a different algorithm — so it was the one spelling this pair could not keep. Every old preset id still opens on the reading it meant. The wire is unchanged: its two slots per reading both carry the one value, as every producer already wrote them.

🚧 Internal

• The website is deployed by a job of its own, after the release it describes. The front page prints the version out of pubspec.yaml on its download button, so the release commit’s own push to main deployed a site reading Download 0.15.0 while the newest release was 0.14.0 — and if an artefact then fails to build, publish never runs and the site goes on saying it. website still builds on every event; website-deploy deploys only over a release that exists — from main when pubspec.yaml already names a released version, and from a tag once publish has published one.
• The end-to-end scope test reads what a frame carried rather than what the window holds. ABI 7 grew the engine’s scope from one block to four so a reader that missed a publish could still find the audio, and both sides of the wire mirror that window — so scopeFrames became the fill of a buffer and stopped being a statement about one frame. The test that proves every block crosses the wire in its own frame was still reading it, and failed on the second frame of every run with 2048 against a clock that had advanced 1024: the window filling, not a block sent twice. It reads lastRunFrames now, which exists for exactly this. Nothing about the plugin or the wire changed. It runs only where a built fake DAW exists, which is a release or a manual run, so it went unseen from the ABI bump to the 0.15.0 tag.
• --publish and --attach=oaa://host:port open the display port and attach to a host at startup. They are what the website’s signal-path photographs are taken with: a desktop publishing and an iPad drawing that desktop’s canvas, neither of which could be reached from a script without posting mouse events at the machine somebody was sitting at. Nothing persists either, so the next launch publishes nothing again.
• Flags reach the application on iOS. main is handed an empty argument list there and Platform.environment is empty as well, both without error, so every launch option did nothing on the one platform a tablet runs on — and xcrun simctl launch --args looked exactly as though it had worked. ios/Runner/OaaLaunchArguments.swift answers with the real argv over oaa/launch_arguments, the application’s seventh platform channel.
• packaging/signal_path.sh takes the website’s desktop and tablet plates from one session, replacing packaging/macos/screenshot.sh and the website’s use of packaging/ios/screenshots.sh. The tablet in it is a remote display attached to that desktop, so the two pictures are one measurement drawn twice rather than two runs matched by transport position — which is what they were, and which shipped a pair reading 00:01:19:21 against 00:01:20:03. It posts no mouse events and needs no Accessibility grant: both windows are placed by writing the preferences that hold their geometry.
• The signal-path plates on the front page were reshot. The tablet one is now an iPad attached to the desktop beside it rather than an iPad metering a plugin of its own, which is what the paragraph above them describes.
• OAA_ABI_VERSION is 8, and this release moves it twice.
• oaa_engine_reset_all destroys every engine the process created and did not destroy, and the application calls it from main. It reclaims nothing in a shipping run: it exists for a Flutter hot restart, which re-runs main in a process that never exited, so nothing disposed the previous isolate’s engine and it went on running its analysis thread — and holding a macOS process tap and the aggregate device under it — for the rest of the session. A development afternoon left a dozen of them metering at once.
• oaa_snapshot.scope holds 4,096 stereo pairs rather than 1,024 and scope_frames counts how many are audio. The wire protocol is unchanged at version 5 — a plugin still sends one block per frame, the newest of the window — and the engine’s tests hold the window’s order, its slide and its reset.
• The CLI suite decodes the tool’s output as UTF-8, which is what the tool writes. It was decoded with the system encoding — on Windows the ANSI code page — so the two dynamics-floor tests, the first to assert a line carrying ≥, failed on that platform alone while the CLI itself was fine.
• OAA_GATE_ABSOLUTE lives in oaa_loudness.h rather than in the loudness source, so the analysis layer gates the dynamics readings on the same constant the integrated measurement is gated on.
• The Open Graph card is rendered at 1280×640 rather than 1200×630, which is the size GitHub asks a repository’s social preview for, so the same image serves the link unfurl and the repository page without being cropped.
• The website’s photographs are re-rendered against these modules: all fourteen thumbnails and the front page’s analyzer still at its five widths. They are committed output rather than built in CI, so they go stale silently, and the modules moved under them twice over — the Decibel pass and the readings above it. The three signal-path plates are not among them and still show the previous design: making one needs a signed application on a window server or an iPad simulator, which the machine that renders the rest does not do.

0.14.0 — 2026-08-27

⚡ Changed

• The engine, the FFI bindings, the domain model and the wire protocol are GPL-3.0-or-later; they were MIT. Open Audio Analyzer is copyleft throughout now, apart from plugin/, which stays AGPL-3.0-or-later because it links JUCE. Nothing changes for anyone using the application, the CLI, the plugin or a tablet display. What changes is embedding: engine/, oaa_engine, oaa_core and oaa_wire could be linked into a closed-source product and now cannot — a derivative you distribute has to carry its source under the same terms. Commercial use is still permitted, as the GPL has always permitted it; the proprietary fork is the part that is not. Releases up to 0.13.0 stay MIT and that grant cannot be withdrawn, so anything already built against those versions keeps working under the terms it was written to. docs/WIRE.md is unchanged and still normative: a display implemented from the specification rather than from packages/oaa_wire is unaffected, which is the case for two of the three implementations that exist.

• The front page says what you do before it says what that buys you. Its How it works section opens with the setup — the plugin on your master bus, the app on the desktop beside you, a tablet attached to the same session — and makes the claim about one engine and one set of numbers after it, which is what it used to open with.

• The Known gaps section is off the front page, along with its entry in the site navigation. All twelve are in README.md and in the documentation, which is where the section already pointed for the other six. The one gap a reader has to act on rather than know about stayed on the page: the tablet link has no password, so publish on a network you control. It is now a sentence in the paragraph that describes the tablet.

• The website says less about how a number is arrived at and more about what it tells you. The percentiles behind LRA, the FFT behind the spectrum’s band spacing, how a colour scheme file inherits and what a layout is stored as have come off the front page; every one of them is still in docs/METRICS.md or the README. Nothing a reader acts on was removed.

• The documentation’s overview page is trimmed the same way: the window length behind the spectrum’s bands, the filter order behind the VU needle, how the oscilloscope derives a column’s colour and why the official vector files cannot be a build step have come off it. Every control a module offers is still documented there, and every claim about a measurement is unchanged; the mechanism is in docs/METRICS.md, README.md and the engine’s own headers.

• The Android test page says what staying opted in is for: Google wants twelve testers opted in for fourteen unbroken days before the app can leave closed testing. The site footer reads a little shorter, with no change to what it says.

• The install page and the documentation’s overview stop explaining the parts of themselves that only a contributor reads: why an AppImage is built on an old distribution, what the Mac App Store sandbox would do to a container, how Apple makes a refused system-audio tap undetectable, how Play generates a download from an app bundle. Every instruction, path, permission and warning on those pages is unchanged.

• The note under the front page’s download table is gone. Which installers carry the plugin is a column in the table above it, and what metering your computer’s own output needs is on the install page.

• The install page’s download table says which installers carry the plugin in the same colour the front page’s does, rather than with a tick. The two tables answer the same question and now answer it the same way; the rows that carry no plugin stay in the body colour, so the column reads as an answer rather than as decoration.

🐛 Fixed

• plugin/ ships a LICENSE file. Every source file there carried the AGPL-3.0-or-later identifier and the directory carried no licence text at all, which is the one thing AGPL section 4 asks of anyone conveying it. The installers were unaffected — they generate their notice from the repository root — so this was missing only for somebody reading the source.
• The privacy policy said the Android build never asks for the microphone, because it was “a remote display only”. It has metered a live input since 0.12.1 and declares RECORD_AUDIO, so the policy described a permission the application does ask for as one it could not. It now says what both tablets do: the microphone is asked for the first time you choose an input, on Android as on iPadOS, and a tablet that only draws another machine’s meters is never asked.
• The documentation contents and the install page called the iPad and Android builds “tablet displays”. They run the whole application, with the engine compiled in, and can additionally draw a remote host’s meters.

🚧 Internal

• The Play Store’s “What’s new” text is chosen from the release’s changelog section rather than taken from the top of it until the 500 characters run out. An entry’s bold lead is now its store note where it has one, those entries are taken before the rest, and the sections are filled a turn at a time — so 0.13.0’s note reaches the mono Phase Scope and the machine that could attach to itself, where the old rule spent the whole budget inside Added. The text is en-US and deliberately has no second language.
• TestFlight builds carry a What to Test note, and the App Store listing a What’s New, both generated from the same changelog section as Play’s by packaging/store_notes.py. Apple allows 4000 characters against Play’s 500, so a release usually arrives there with its entries whole. Every build up to 0.13.0 went to TestFlight with that field empty.
• A manual run of the workflow can write those notes onto a build App Store Connect already holds, without uploading anything — which is the only way to exercise that path that does not cost a tag and a build number. Naming a build also turns the plugin, the installers, the IPA and the app bundle off for that run.
• The end-to-end test that carries a DAW’s audio through the plugin, the app and out to a display no longer fails when the frame it freezes for comparison carries no oscilloscope audio. A relayed scope run holds what was measured between two sends and is legitimately empty when a publish lands between two of the engine’s generations; the test indexed it regardless and died on the arithmetic. It failed the 0.13.0 release with every other job green.

0.13.0 — 2026-08-27

✨ Added

• A status bar across the bottom of the window. Everything the top row used to report is in it: the signal source, the sample rate and channel count, the DAW’s playhead, the elapsed clock and the delivery target. What is left in the top row is what you press — the File menu, ANALYSE FILE, the pairing code, PUBLISH, ATTACH, settings, restart and ? — with the open preset’s name centred between them, which on macOS is where a window’s title goes because that row is the title bar.
• A layout nobody has saved yet is called Unnamed rather than Loudness, and that is the word the Save as dialog opens with for you to replace. A fresh install used to print a document name nobody had chosen and offer Loudness.json as though it were the name to keep.
• The front page carries the App Store and Google Play badges, beside the Download, Source and Documentation buttons. The App Store badge is drawn greyed and unlinked until the iPad build clears review, which is the whole of what says so — each badge stands on its own artwork, with no caption under it.
• A new page at /testing explains how to get into the Android closed test, in three steps. It is where the Google Play badge leads, and it exists because neither URL Play offers can be sent to a stranger: a closed test grants access by list rather than by link, so both of them turn away anybody who is not already a tester, and neither explains why.

⚡ Changed

• The File menu moved to the far left of the top row, where a menu bar’s first menu is, on Windows and Linux. It was between ATTACH and ANALYSE FILE at the right-hand end.
• SETTINGS and RESET are drawn as marks — two faders, and a ring with an arrowhead — beside the ? that was already one. Both keep a tooltip, and RESET’s has always been where the scope of what it discards is written. The words were 145 px of a row that has to leave room for the document’s name; the marks are 84.
• The smallest supported window is now 960x808, up from 960x768 (macOS; the only platform that enforces one). The canvas is a fixed 24x16 cells, so a row taken out of the window is height taken off every module: at 768 the smallest module in the default preset had 4 px of body to spare and the Alert Meter had none, so the new row is paid for by the window rather than by the meters.
• The prompt that asks about unsaved work says “The layout on the canvas has changes that are not in a file” for a layout that has never been saved, rather than quoting the placeholder name back at you.
• The file analysis dialog opens without 64 px of empty space above and below its drop zone. It also no longer changes height when you drop a file: the idle state and the analysing state are now within a few pixels of each other.

🐛 Fixed

• The open preset’s name no longer disappears on a window under 1266 px. It had the highest width gate in the old single row and was the first thing dropped; centred in the top row it needs 900 px, which is under the narrowest window the application supports.
• PUBLISH can no longer be taken away by narrowing the window. It was the last of the three remote controls to be dropped, and under that width there was no way anywhere in the application to stop publishing — a capability removed by a window size. The whole remote group now survives every width the row is built at.
• The Phase Scope no longer looks broken on a mono source. A one-channel source is L == R exactly — the engine copies channel 0 into the right slot, which is true and documented — and rotating that gives a hard vertical line that never moves, indistinguishable from a display that has stuck. It says MONO SOURCE across the face now, keeps its graticule, dissolves whatever trail was there rather than freezing it, and draws its correlation bar as an empty track — +1 pinned against the right end is the same tautology one row lower. Correlation is still measured, and a Number Box set to it still prints the number. The Stereo Cloud has said this since 0.2.0 for the same reason.
• Android can measure a live input. The manifest declared no RECORD_AUDIO, so Android refused every capture device while the canvas, the modules and the engine behind them all worked — which looked like the platform being a remote display by design, and was documented that way. It asks for the microphone when you first choose an input, not at launch, so a tablet that only mirrors another machine is never asked.
• The File menu reads as one menu. Three things, all of them visible the first time it was drawn on the machine it is written on: the shortcuts are in one column at the right of the menu rather than packed against the end of each label, where Ctrl+O sat 90 px left of Ctrl+I; all six labels are in one column, where the two rows that carry a tick used to be indented past the four that cannot; and neither tick row is greyed while it is off, because the two are checkboxes and not a choice between each other. Windows and Linux only — macOS draws this menu in the system menu bar.
• The gap between FILE and ANALYSE FILE is the same 8 px seam as everywhere else in the top row. It was 16, meant as a boundary between a menu and a command, and read as one control placed wrong.
• A machine can no longer attach to itself. A desktop that is publishing hears its own announcement, so its own name was a row in its own host list — the only row, on a machine alone on the network — and tapping it covered the canvas with a copy of the canvas, arriving over a socket a frame late, with nothing failing anywhere to say so. The list leaves this machine out and says that is why it is empty, and an address typed or a code scanned that points here is refused with a sentence instead of dialled.

🚧 Internal

• Apple’s and Google’s badge artwork is committed under website/public/badges/ exactly as each publishes it, and the trademark credit line both of them require is in the site footer.
• Both rows’ width gates are arithmetic on one table of measured control widths (BarMetrics) rather than eight hand-measured totals, and scaling_test.dart holds every number in that table against the widget it names — from both sides, so a bound that has gone slack fails as loudly as one that has been outgrown. Twice a gate was measured against a string the running application had already replaced, and both times the suite stayed green while the row ran off its edge.
• The sweep that pumps the whole application at every width now runs from 480 px rather than 600, which is where both rows actually stop, and it measures the distance from the centred document name to every control in the top row: the name is a layer of a Stack, and two layers of a Stack overlap in silence.
• A debug build draws the FILE button on macOS as well, beside ANALYSE FILE, so the row two thirds of the platforms ship can be looked at on the machine most of this is written on — both defects it has had were ones a glance would have caught. Release builds are unchanged: a Mac’s File menu is in the system menu bar. It was --in-window-menu for an afternoon; a flag nobody remembers to pass shows nobody anything.

0.12.0 — 2026-08-25

✨ Added

• The front page shows how the parts fit together. A new section between the analyzer and the module catalogue follows one stream of audio through the three programs that read it — the plugin measuring in a DAW, the desktop drawing the canvas, a tablet mirroring it over Wi-Fi — with a photograph of each. It was only ever stated in prose, two-thirds of the way down the page.
• The Android build is distributed through Google Play. A tagged release builds a signed app bundle and uploads it to the internal testing track once the release is published, so a build on a track always belongs to a release that exists. There is no .apk on the releases page and there will not be one: an app bundle is a publishing format rather than an installable file, and the download Play generates from it is signed with a key Google holds. Play offers it to tablets only: the manifest asks for a 600dp shortest screen edge, which a 7-inch tablet clears and a handset does not. It is a store filter and not a runtime one — nothing about the application behaves differently, and a build installed by hand runs wherever it is put.

🚧 Internal

• packaging/android/screenshots.sh photographs the Android build for the Play Store, driven by the fake DAW through the real plugin, the way packaging/ios/screenshots.sh already photographed the iPad. An emulator is not on the host’s network stack the way an iOS simulator is, so the application binds the emulator’s own loopback and adb forward is what lets the plugin reach it.
• The default preset does not fit a real 10-inch tablet. At 1280x800 dp the six readouts along the top row render the words TOO SMALL rather than a number, because the layout wants roughly the iPad Pro’s 1376x1032 pt. The screenshot script works around it with a lower density; the layout itself is unchanged.
• The release on GitHub is titled with the tag alone — v0.12.0 rather than “Open Audio Analyzer v0.12.0”. The repository’s name is already printed above every release, so the prefix said it three times in one row and pushed the version off to the right.
• The Android jobs pin the JDK from .tool-versions rather than naming their own. The two disagreed — the file said 25 while CI said 17 — which is the drift the Flutter pin already had a rule against.
• packaging/macos/screenshot.sh photographs the whole desktop application window, driven by the fake DAW through the real plugin, the way packaging/ios/screenshots.sh already photographed the iPad. The website had no picture of the application as a program — only of its meters.
• The Play Store listing’s two graphics are generated and committed. The icon is written by packaging/icon/make_icons.dart like every other icon, now with the alpha channel Play asks for and Apple rejects; the feature graphic is a card set in the application’s own faces, rendered from a page by packaging/android/make_store_graphics.sh. Both were going to be exported by hand from a drawing at upload time, which is the arrangement the icon generator exists to have ended.
• The Android release build signs with a real upload key when one is configured, where it signed with the debug key unconditionally. Without the key it still falls back to the debug key, so flutter run --release keeps working for somebody who has never seen the credential — but packaging/android/make_aab.sh reads the certificate back off the finished bundle and discards a debug-signed one rather than offering it. Nothing in an .aab records which key signed it, so Play rejecting it by fingerprint at the end of an upload would otherwise be the first thing to notice.
• The Android version code is the workflow’s run counter, for the reason the iPad build’s already is. Play refuses a version code it has ever accepted, on any track, and refuses any number below the highest it has seen; the hand-maintained +N in pubspec.yaml collides on a re-run of a tag.
• android/build/ and android/.kotlin/ are git-ignored. Gradle writes them whatever Flutter does with the artefacts, and they only appear once somebody builds for Android — which nothing here did routinely until now.
• The website is built by CI on every event and deployed to Cloudflare on a push to main. It was deployed by hand, which is as durable as somebody remembering: the site reads the application’s version out of pubspec.yaml at build time, so from a tag until the next deploy it advertised the previous release. Building it on a pull request is also the check that every document the manual publishes is still where the manifest says it is — a renamed page now fails a pull request rather than disappearing from the site.
• The GitHub Pages job is gone, and tool/docs.dart with it. What it published was a redirect per page to the website that replaced it; those redirects are already deployed and Pages serves whatever it was last given, so the old jonasgrunau.github.io addresses go on arriving at the documentation without anything continuing to publish them.
• The live analyzer’s recording and the 45 seconds of audio it was measured from are committed — 1.2 MB, and already published on the site. They were written by npm run record on a developer’s machine and git-ignored, which a runner that deploys the site cannot do: recording needs the 35 MB source track, and no job here fetches somebody else’s music to publish a page. The CC BY credit is committed beside them.
• npm run record encodes through ffmpeg where afconvert is not there, so the whole recording path runs on Linux rather than on a Mac only. afconvert is still preferred where it exists — Apple’s AAC is the better encoder at 128 kbit/s, and the committed excerpt was made with it.
• oaa.h said this build never sets OAA_FLAG_SPECTRUM_UNAVAILABLE, and README.md repeated it. It does set it: a reset raises the flag and the analysis pass clears it once a full window has been transformed, about 85 ms in. A consumer that believed the header and skipped the check drew the floor — indistinguishable from digital silence — and presented it as a measurement. The flag itself is unchanged, so no ABI version moves.
• plugin/AGENTS.md gave the plugin bundles’ macOS deployment target as 11.0. It has been 14.2 since the tap landed, which is what plugin/CMakeLists.txt sets and what every other document says.
• docs/AGENTS.md pointed at tool/AGENTS.md for how the documentation site is published; that moved to website/ when tool/docs.dart went.
• packaging/AGENTS.md records that GitHub substitutes a dot for each space when an installer is attached to a release, which is why the scripts write Open Audio Analyzer-… and the install pages quote Open.Audio.Analyzer-…. Nothing said so, and the two read as a stale copy of each other.
• The site offers OAA to Google as an alternative site name. A result was headed open-audio-analyzer.com rather than Open Audio Analyzer, which is what Google shows when its site-name system is not confident enough to use the name a page states — every other signal already agreed, so alternateName is the one lever left. The domain is deliberately not among the alternatives.

0.11.0 — 2026-08-24

📐 Measurement

• Audio missed while the capture source was stopped is now counted as lost audio, so the frame count includes it and the warning appears. It previously counted nothing at all: integrated loudness and LRA average every block since the reset, so a device that stopped for a minute produced a reading of the programme minus that minute and presented it exactly like a clean one. A stall’s share of the count is derived from the analysis clock rather than from the ring, so it is accurate to about a quarter of a second rather than to the frame — enough to prove audio was lost, which is what the figure is for. Re-measure any session where the warning appeared.
• The System Output tap no longer measures an output device that has changed its own sample rate. A macOS output device can move rate without ceasing to be the default output — AirPods drop from 48 kHz to 24 kHz the moment anything opens their microphone — and the tap went on delivering while the K-weighting filters, the true-peak oversampler, the spectrum’s frequency axis and the elapsed clock all stayed built for the rate the engine opened at. Every reading was then wrong by the ratio between the two rates: at half the rate the spectrum sat an octave low and the elapsed clock ran at half real time, with the meters moving convincingly throughout. The source is now reported as stopped and reopened at the device’s new rate. Re-measure anything metered through System Output on a Bluetooth output device.

✨ Added

• A File menu, and presets that are documents. Open… picks a preset through the platform’s own dialog, starting in the presets folder and reaching anywhere else you point it — a preset somebody sent you now opens where it was downloaded to, instead of having to be moved into the configuration directory first. Save writes back to the file it came from without asking, Save as… places a copy anywhere and names the preset after the file, and the open preset’s name sits at the left of the status bar with a dot beside it when it differs from what is on disk. On macOS the menu is in the system menu bar, after the application menu; on Windows and Linux it is the FILE button in the status bar. Opening a preset over unsaved changes asks whether to save first.
• A privacy policy, at open-audio-analyzer.com/privacy. It states what the microphone, the camera, the local network and the disk are used for, that nothing is collected or transmitted, and — the part worth reading — that the remote display link has neither encryption nor authentication, so publishing on a network you do not trust means anybody on it can read your meters. App Store Connect requires the URL; the page is written for a person rather than for that field.

⚡ Changed

• The website serves its three typefaces itself instead of loading them from Google Fonts. Reading a page no longer makes a request to Google, which previously saw the IP address of everybody who opened one — the privacy policy said so and now says the opposite. It is also the reason the site’s text used to move a moment after the page appeared: the fallback face is a different width, so the first paragraph re-wrapped once the real one arrived.
• The faintest text on the website — the footer, the small readouts above each section, every table heading and the documentation contents list — is light enough to read. It was the application’s own textFaint, which is 2.97:1 against the page and under what WCAG asks even of large text; in the application it labels a meter you are already looking at, and on a phone in daylight it was text you could not. The application’s own interface still has this and is not changed here.
• ⌘O now opens a preset, and analysing an audio file has moved to ⌘I. The layout is this application’s document — the thing that is opened, saved and sent to somebody — so it takes the chord every desktop user tries first, and analysing a file is an import, which is what ⌘I means elsewhere. Save on ⌘S and Save as… on ⇧⌘S are both new. Ctrl on Windows and Linux, as always.
• The preset browser is gone, and ⌘P with it. Saving is Save and Save as…; the list of saved layouts is the presets folder in a file manager, which is also where the delete button that used to be in that panel now lives. Settings → Session still prints that folder and lets you select the path.
• Whether a preset carries the delivery target and the skin is a property of the preset now, rather than two switches beside a Save button: two rows in the File menu, each asking whether the preset should carry one and ticked when it does. They cannot go in the platform’s save dialog — macOS would need a save panel of our own, Windows a plugin of its own, and Linux cannot do it at all — and as properties of the document they survive a save, which the switches did not.
• The plugin’s window is drawn in the application’s own palette and the application’s own two typefaces, both compiled into the VST3, the Audio Unit and the Standalone rather than asked of the platform — so the panel looks the same in Logic on a Mac as it does in Reaper on Windows, and looks like the tool whose meters it is feeding. What it shows changed with it: a diagram of the three places the path can break, with each run lit only while something is travelling down it, and the socket’s dashes moving while frames are actually being sent, so a link that came up and quietly stopped no longer looks identical to one that is working. The middle of that chain is the app icon itself, drawn as line art in the shape macOS masks an icon with, so the thing you picked out of the DAW’s plugin browser and the thing in the diagram are recognisably the same object. It also names the format it is loaded in and the host it is loaded into, which are the first two facts on every bug report and were the two nobody wrote down.
• A dropped-frame warning in the plugin’s window no longer erases the readings it is a warning about. The count, the missing playhead and the loudness reading shared one line, so the worst news arrived by deleting the evidence; the readings now have a row of their own and the warning sits directly above the Reset button that answers it.
• The plugin’s window says where the meters are when everything is working. A metering plugin that draws nothing is a confusing object the first time somebody inserts one — it loads, it reports itself healthy, and nothing happens — and the line that was blank in exactly that case is the calmest, most readable moment in the window.
• The Super Meter’s target tick is a plain mark again rather than one cut into the arcs. 0.10.0 widened the slot beneath it to stand 1.5 px out either side, which put a notch through all three rings at the target; the slot is back to the tick’s own width, so the rings run unbroken and only the tick crosses them. 0.10.0’s note describing the wider slot stands as written and is superseded by this one.
• Every menu in the application marks the value it holds with a check and a band across the whole row. The band used to be the darkest colour in the skin, which in Precision Instrument put a near-black hole in a menu that is itself nearly black, and it stopped short of the menu’s edges so the current value read as a chip sitting in the list rather than as one of its rows. It is a wash of the colour the rest of the interface already uses for selection now, it reaches both sides, and the check says which row it is without anybody having to compare two greys. Menus of actions — duplicate, rename, delete — hold no value and are unchanged.
• The iPad build no longer offers itself to iPhones. Its Xcode target had been universal since the project was created, so a phone could install a twenty-four-column canvas drawn for a tablet, and App Store Connect asked for a set of iPhone screenshots of it. It is iPad-only now, which is what every document already said it was.

🐛 Fixed

• The live analyzer’s own document no longer offers itself to search engines as oaa_analyzer_demo, described as “A new Flutter project.”. It is the page the front page loads into an iframe, and it had shipped as the Flutter scaffold wrote it — no language, no viewport, and a title and description that described the project worse than nothing would have. It now says what it is and asks not to be indexed.
• The website’s 404 page no longer asks to be indexed, and no longer tells crawlers that every address without a page is really /404.
• “Linux dependencies” in the building document is a second-level heading, so the page no longer skips from its title straight to a third level.
• Re-saving a preset no longer silently drops the delivery target or the skin it was carrying. The two switches in the preset browser reset to off every time the panel opened and were never read back from the preset being saved, so opening a layout that carried EBU R 128, moving one module and saving wrote a preset that carried nothing — and nothing in the interface said so. They are rows in the File menu now, and they are ticked from the preset itself.
• The meters no longer freeze until you switch to another source. A capture source that stopped delivering left the engine publishing an empty ring at the same forty-seven frames a second for the rest of the session: every meter held its last reading, the window and the menus stayed perfectly responsive around it, RESET moved the readings to their floors and they held there, and nothing anywhere said why. The engine now notices within a quarter of a second, puts the source back itself when the format allows it, and says so on screen; when only a new engine can follow the device, the application opens one and the notice says the measurement has restarted. Reported as: the meters freeze, reset resets them but they stay stuck, and it only comes back when I switch to another sound source.
• A System Output tap whose rebuild fails when the default output device changes is no longer dead for the rest of the session. It tore the old chain down, failed to build the new one — a format that had moved, a device that vanished between the notification and the query — and left no producer and nothing that would ever try again. It is retried once a second now, against whatever the default output is at the time, so a device that comes back or a rate that returns is picked up without the source being reselected. Reselecting it was never the remedy the code comments claimed it was: choosing the source that is already chosen changes no setting, so nothing reopened.

🚧 Internal

• npm run audit runs Lighthouse over every page the website publishes, mobile and desktop, and prints the four category scores per page. Nothing in ci.yml builds or measures that directory, so the score was only ever as durable as the next change; the page list comes out of the documentation manifest, so a new document is measured without the script being edited. It also parses every JSON-LD block, which no Lighthouse audit does.
• website/public/_headers gives the deploy a cache policy. Cloudflare’s default for static assets is max-age=0, must-revalidate, which is an ETag round trip for a typeface that will never change again; the fonts are a year and immutable because their filenames carry the family version, the committed photographs a month because they are regenerated in place, and the HTML revalidates so a deploy is seen at once.
• The website’s sitemap is generated from the documentation manifest rather than written by hand, and its <lastmod> is each source file’s commit date, left out rather than guessed when git cannot answer. The hand-written one it replaces named the front page alone for as long as the documentation had been part of the site.
• Every page of the website states what it is in JSON-LD rather than all ten claiming to be the application: the front page is the software, a documentation page is a TechArticle with a breadcrumb, the privacy policy is a page, and the 404 claims nothing. No rating is asserted, because there is no rating data.
• The front page’s photograph is published at 768, 1024, 1440, 1920 and 2560 px with a srcset. It is the element the page’s Largest Contentful Paint is measured on, and one 2560 px file was arriving on phones to be drawn a seventh of that wide — a phone now gets 28 or 41 kB depending on its screen, against 121 kB before.
• The plugin’s editor renders to a PNG without a DAW. plugin/test/editor_snapshot.cpp photographs its five states — waiting, connected, reconnecting, no playhead, dropping frames — in about a second, needing no host, no window and no screen-recording permission. It is the one surface in this repository that nothing but a person loading a bundle could previously look at, and its interesting states were the ones that had to be arranged for.
• Pressing “Load the live analyzer” on the front page now animates rather than swapping its label: the play mark travels to the middle of the picture, the label goes the other way and disappears behind it, and the square around the mark rounds into a ring that spins for as long as the two megabytes take — then the whole control fades out with the frame it was covering. A reader who has asked the system for less motion gets the label change instead, and either way a live region announces the wait and the end of it.
• The live analyzer’s “play the audio” control sets the gap between its note and its label from Space rather than from two monospace spaces, which at that size was 13 px — wider than the padding around the pair, so the note read as sitting nearer the border than the words it belongs to. The note and the words are also centred in the button now: they share a baseline but not a face — ♪ is in neither of the two the demo bundles — so the fallback’s descent set the row’s depth and left the words two pixels low and the note one.
• The front page’s demo canvas draws its oscilloscope over five seconds, overlaid on one centre line and zoomed to fill the lane. A triggered twenty-millisecond window is the right default in the application, where the picture moves; frozen into a still it read as one cycle of a sine and said nothing about the programme.
• The front page says less. The hero no longer recites the standards, the module catalogue no longer explains that its pictures are photographs, and the dynamics section states what Open Audio Analyzer reports rather than framing it as a substitute for a figure another product computes.
• The website no longer names the commercial analyser it set out from. The footer, the manual’s opening page, the macOS system-audio section of the install page and the Dynamics section of the metrics reference each explained Open Audio Analyzer by comparison; each now states what it does on its own terms, and the one claim that mattered — that no proprietary single-figure dynamics number is reproduced or approximated — is made without naming a product. The footer says what the canvas is for while it is at it: a preset per way of working, one for tracking, one for mixing, one for the last hour before a master goes out. Released sections of this changelog still name the product and are left as written.
• On a phone the front page’s canvas is a photograph and nothing else. The control that loads the live analyzer is not drawn there, and neither is the line under the picture: eight dense meters scaled to a 390 px screen are not legible, the compiled application behind that control is two megabytes over whatever connection a phone has, and an iframe that takes touch inside a document you are scrolling fights the scroll for every gesture. The two go together — the credit is required of a page that publishes the programme, and with nothing to press the audio is never fetched. A tablet is above the breakpoint and still gets the real thing.
• The analyzer still is re-rendered without the demo’s own play-the-audio button in the corner of it. ?seconds= — the query string that freezes the demo for a screenshot — now takes that button off the canvas as well; the audio is still decoded, because the oscilloscope and the phase scope draw from it. It matters because of the line above: with no facade control on a phone, the button inside the photograph was the only play mark left on that screen, and it was a picture of one.
• The play mark on that control is a drawn path rather than a typed character. ▶ is on the emoji tables with a text default presentation, which a desktop honours and a phone does not: iOS and Android both resolved it out of the colour emoji font, so the hairline square came out holding an oversized emoji play button.
• The front page is written for somebody making a record rather than for somebody reading the source. The architecture section is gone, and so is the readout of a quantity nobody measured; the measurement table says what each reading means and which published standard it follows instead of how the filters and windows are built; the modules, the configuration and the dynamics sections are in a musician’s terms; the correctness panel says that the meters are held against the EBU’s own reference cases rather than listing what a continuous-integration run asserts and in what units; and Known gaps carries the six a musician will actually meet — no Pro Tools plugin, metering the system’s output takes all of it, the plugin needs the app running beside it — in place of two that only meant something to a contributor, one of which had also been wrong since releases started being signed. All of it is still stated in full in README.md and docs/METRICS.md, which is where a reader has asked for it.
• The documentation pages mark the section you are reading again. The list on the right was driven by an IntersectionObserver watching a band of negative height — nothing intersects one of those, so the callback ran once as the page loaded and never again, and every page marked its first heading and held that mark to the end. It reads the scroll position directly now, once per frame.
• Four things about how the documentation is set. A code listing has space above it again: the rule removing the browser’s own block margins outranked the one that spaces every other block, so a listing stood flush against the sentence introducing it. The # beside a heading sits in front of the words rather than a line above them, and is drawn in the accent it declares rather than in the heading’s own white. And the first column of a metric table fits its names — it had been sized from a width that let Correlation break in half while the sentence beside it took the room.
• packaging/ios/screenshots.sh renders the App Store screenshots, and packaging/ios/app-store.md holds the listing text beside them. The pictures are of the application metering real music rather than a test tone: a simulator app binds the host’s own loopback, so the fake DAW in plugin/host/ plays a track through the real plugin into the port the application already listens on, and every reading in them was measured by the engine.

0.10.1 — 2026-08-23

⚡ Changed

• The name under the application’s icon is Audio Analyzer on iPadOS and Android, where it was OAA. A home screen gives a label about eleven characters before it starts dropping the spaces out of one, so the full name has never fit there and the initials went in instead — which read as an acronym nobody outside this repository knows. Nothing else is renamed: the bundle identifier, the window title, the installers and the desktop builds are untouched, so no permission grant moves with it.

🐛 Fixed

• The documentation site’s sitemap names the eight documentation pages as well as the front page. It had named the front page alone since before the manual was part of the site, so nothing but the home page was being offered to a search engine that asked.
• The version on the site’s download button is read from pubspec.yaml at build time. src/lib/app.mjs was written to do exactly that and then had no importer at all — both pages still carried the number as text, so the button was correct only for as long as nobody tagged anything.

🚧 Internal

• The site’s demos replay what the engine measured instead of playing a mock. website/tools/oaa_record/ is a Dart CLI that links the real engine by FFI, pushes forty-five seconds of a real track through it and writes down the readings; website/tools/oaa_replay/ holds that format and ReplaySource, a fourth MeterSource beside native memory, the socket a tablet reads and the mock this replaces. Both Flutter targets play the same recording, so the fourteen stills and the live canvas can no longer disagree about what the material did — and no reading on the site is invented any more. The track is CC BY 3.0 and is not in this repository: npm run record refuses to run without the attribution file tool/fetch_test_audio.dart writes, because the licence asks for the credit wherever the audio is published, and the front page carries it under the canvas.
• npm run check in website/ opens every page at 360, 390 and 768 px with the viewport actually overridden and fails if the document scrolls sideways, naming the widest element rather than the overflow. It is the one responsive defect that is invisible in a screenshot and obvious on a phone, and a browser window cannot be dragged narrow enough to show it. Not part of npm run build, because it needs Chrome.
• The front page’s hero is one column and a measure wide rather than two, and the section rail in the manual tracks at 0.08em so that the longest heading fits on one line in the 215 px it has.
• Claude Code’s .claude/ is ignored. Its settings.json named a hook by an absolute path inside one developer’s home directory, which would have failed silently on any other machine.
• The website’s tab icon survives a run of the icon generator. packaging/icon/make_icons.dart wrote the app icon’s tile over website/public/favicon.svg, which is a different drawing on purpose — the wave cropped out of the tile and stroked in the signal colour, because a tab shows it at 16 px where the tile is mostly ramp. The hand-drawn version therefore lasted until the next run of the generator and was reverted with no error and no diff anybody read. The generator no longer writes that one file, and says why where the line was.
• website/public/oaa.svg is back. It is the app icon’s tile, written by the generator, and scripts/og.html references it rather than holding a copy of the mark; it was deleted in the change that redrew the logo while that reference stayed, so the Open Graph card had been pointing at a missing file.
• website/AGENTS.md describes the directory as it is: the documentation pages and the two lists that decide what they are, the live analyzer and the mock the two Flutter targets share, and why tools/ is outside the repository’s analyze gate. Its file table had been an inventory of a website that no longer existed — three files it named were gone and eighteen it did not name were there.
• CLAUDE.md, assets/AGENTS.md and tool/AGENTS.md no longer say that tool/docs.dart renders the documentation site. It renders one redirect per page now, and the manifest it used to carry lives in website/src/lib/docs.mjs.

0.10.0 — 2026-08-22

✨ Added

• A skin editor. Settings → Appearance → Edit skin opens all thirteen colour roles with a picker on each, and the canvas behind the panel repaints as you drag — as does a tablet mirroring the session. Every role prints its contrast ratio against the surface it is read on, and the ones below the floor that role is held to are marked with the reason; a low-contrast palette still saves, because refusing to save what is already on screen is worse than a warning. Skins remain plain JSON files and hand-editing them is unchanged.
• Skins can be deleted from the editor, which previously meant finding the file.
• Reset, beside Edit on Settings → Meters → Delivery target, deletes every target you have saved and puts the built-in six back. It asks first, in a dialog naming what goes, and afterwards says how many files it removed. Targets you wrote by hand are gone from the disk, so this is also how a correction to a built-in is undone without going looking for its JSON file.
• The VU Meter marks where the needle reached. A mark rides the scale at the loudest point of the last second and a half and then falls back to the needle, because a 300 ms movement is slow by design and the loudest moment of a phrase is over before the needle has finished describing it. It is the same quantity the needle draws, held rather than measured a second time.
• The VU Meter prints its reading and its reference along the bottom of the face: the deflection in VU on the left, and which dBFS level reads as 0 VU on the right. The second one is the genuinely confusing thing about a VU meter and the face now says it out loud. A module too small for either drops it and keeps the dial.
• The Spectrogram and the Oscilloscope can be drawn in full colour. Colour: Full RGB in either module’s menu replaces the skin’s one-hue ramp, and what it paints is the quantity that module’s axes leave uncoloured. On the Spectrogram that is the level: the spectrogram rainbow, indigo through green and yellow to red and white, which separates far more steps of level than one hue can. On the Oscilloscope it is the band balance, because a waveform has no frequency axis at all: red, green and blue are its bass, its mids and its highs, split at 200 Hz and 2 kHz, so a kick is red, a hat is blue and a full-spectrum hit is white, the way DJ software has coloured audio for twenty years. That balance is taken in decibels against the loudest of the three bands rather than in power — bass carries an order of magnitude more power than air does, and a power mix draws every piece of music red — and it is recorded with the column, so the picture holds its colours instead of being repainted by whatever is playing now. A column whose source published no spectrum keeps the accent rather than being handed a colour that would claim a balance nobody measured. Off by default in both, because a rainbow reads as more precise than the measurement behind it, it collapses for the eight percent of men who cannot separate red from green, and on the Spectrogram it brings its own dark ground into a light skin. Nothing measured changes at either setting: no reading, no report and no byte on the wire moves.

⚡ Changed

• A menu marks the value it holds by recessing that row, not by brightening it. Every dropdown in the application — the delivery target, the signal source, and a module’s dozen settings — used to print its current value as the lightest row in the menu, which put the emphasis on the one choice pressing cannot change and left the options you can still take looking greyed out. The chosen row now sits in a darker well and the alternatives sit on the menu’s own surface, which is how selection reads everywhere else in the interface. Nothing about what the menus contain or choose changed.
• The signal source in the status bar is a bordered chip, the same shape the delivery target beside it has always had. It is the menu people open most and it was drawn as a dot and a bare word in a row of bordered controls, which reads as a caption rather than as something you can click. The dot stays, inside the chip: bright while something is being metered, dim on Silence.
• The OAA wordmark is gone from the status bar. The window carries the application’s name; the bar carries what changes while you work, and three capitals that never change were the one item in it saying nothing about the signal. Every width at which the bar drops an item moved with it — the controls at the narrow end now leave 25 to 40 px earlier than they did, because a bordered chip cannot give back the width a bare word could. All of them still have keyboard shortcuts except the three remote controls, which is unchanged.
• The sample rate no longer prints flush against the DAW’s playhead. The gap between the source group and the readings is a fixed one now rather than whatever the window had left over, so it is there at every width instead of only on a wide one.
• The VU Meter has a face. The scale is a band along the rim rather than a hairline arc, red above 0 VU over a tinted ring, and the needle is a taper under a machined hub — so how far up the scale the programme is can be read from the rim before the needle is read at all. Nothing about the movement, the ballistics or the reading changed.
• The Loudness Distribution fits its loudness axis to the programme instead of always drawing −60 to 0 LUFS. A mastered programme’s gated distribution occupies eight to fifteen of those sixty decibels, so the picture the LRA reading is taken from was squeezed into a fifth of the module with the rest left blank; the axis now holds every occupied bin, the gated range and the delivery target, rounds outwards to whole ticks, and stays where it is until the distribution grows past it. No reading changes — the same bins are drawn against a shorter stretch of the same scale. Scale: Full range in the module’s menu restores the published axis, which is the one to pick when two distributions are being compared side by side.
• Open Audio Analyzer has a new logo, and every icon it ships follows it. A white waveform on a teal ramp, replacing the four teal bars on graphite. The app icon, the installers’ icons, the Android launcher icon, the layered icon macOS and iOS render, the favicon, the documentation site’s header, the README and the social card all change together. The tile is also a rounder shape than it was, because the one macOS 26 and iOS 26 draw is rounder than the one every version before them drew. Nothing about what the application measures or displays is affected.
• The icon reads less well at 16 px than the one it replaces, and that is a real cost rather than an oversight. Four bars at four heights survived being two pixels wide; a waveform with nine excursions across twelve pixels does not, and no stroke weight rescues it. The line is held at one device pixel so that it stays white instead of smearing to grey, and the sizes the icon is now designed around are 32 px and up. Where this shows is the Windows Explorer list view and a Linux panel at its smallest setting.
• Precision Instrument and Daylight can no longer be replaced. A skin file naming one of their two ids used to shadow the built-in; it is now ignored, and the skin editor offers Save as new rather than an in-place save. The two shipped skins are what proves the thirteen colour roles are semantic rather than aliases for particular colours, and a reference point a file on disk can quietly redefine is not one. If you had such a file it is inert now — rename its id and it comes back as a skin of its own. Delivery targets are unaffected and still shadow their built-ins, because a target is a claim about somebody else’s published specification and has to be correctable without a release.

🐛 Fixed

• The VU Meter no longer draws a needle for a reading nobody measured. The per-channel arrays are NaN while a remote display’s link to the host is quiet, and the dial rested at the bottom of its scale with exactly the confidence it reads a quiet passage with; the face now shows no needle and the reading is an em dash. Only a tablet display could reach this.
• The VU Meter’s scale numbers no longer overprint each other on a small module: −5 and −3 sit close together on a face that crowds towards the bottom in voltage, and at the narrowest widths they collided into one smear. The face now sheds the numbers it has no room for, keeping 0 and both ends.
• A panel that scrolls draws one scrollbar rather than two. Settings, and every other panel tall enough to scroll, carried the skin’s own thumb on its right edge and a second, wider grey one immediately inside it, which faded in whenever the panel was scrolled. The second was supplied by Flutter, which decorates a scrolling region on macOS, Windows and Linux without being asked; the panel now declines it. Tablets never showed it.
• The Super Meter’s target tick sits in its slot again. The slot is a surround laid down under the tick so that its contrast is identical on all three rings, whatever each ring is currently drawing; it was being stroked at exactly the tick’s own width, so the tick covered it completely and was read against the arc after all. It stands 1.5 px out either side now, which is what the constant describing it always said. The tick itself is unchanged.

🚧 Internal

• The skin editor’s suite waits for the effect of a save rather than for the file. Its helper stopped as soon as the skin’s file existed, which is one event-loop turn before the editor is told the write finished — so the four assertions about what saving then selects raced the disk, and won on a Mac and lost on the Linux runner every time.
• flutter analyze no longer walks website/tools/. The two Flutter web targets that render the real modules for the site now share the mock MeterSource as a package rather than each holding a copy, and a package:oaa_mock import needs package resolution where the relative one it replaced needed none — so on any machine that had not run pub get inside each of them, which is every CI runner, the repository’s analyze gate failed on eight unresolved references in code that no gate builds. They are excluded in analysis_options.yaml and analysed by their own.
• The remote display’s skin frame is rate-limited to one every 150 ms, with the last value always delivered. Dragging a colour in the new editor produces a palette per pointer move, and those frames are queued rather than dropped — unthrottled they grew that queue for as long as the pointer was down.
• The artwork and the program that renders it swapped places. assets/brand/oaa-logo.svg is now the drawing, hand-edited, and packaging/icon/make_icons.dart reads it; previously the mark was four rectangles described as numbers in that program and every vector in the repository was a hand-copied transcription of them, kept in step by a rule saying the mark changed there first and was brought across afterwards. That rule does not scale to a path with three hundred control points. The program now also writes packaging/icon/oaa.svg, the rest of assets/brand/ and the website’s icons, which removes the last four files anybody kept by hand.
• make_icons.dart grew a path rasteriser — an SVG path parser, a cubic flattener and a scanline fill — because the mark is a stroked cubic path and the old renderer only knew rectangles. Still no dependencies. The stroke is drawn as the union of a rectangle per segment and a disc per vertex rather than by offsetting the outline, which is the same shape and is not a research problem.
• The tile’s corner is measured rather than remembered. Three macOS 26 system icons were rendered through NSWorkspace, thresholded to a silhouette and fitted: a corner of a third of the side on a superellipse of exponent 2.7, where the shape Apple drew from iOS 7 to iOS 18 was 22.37% on an exponent near 4. The first cut of this release used the remembered numbers and looked visibly square next to everything else in the Dock.
• The documentation site serves its favicon as a file instead of inlining it into every page as a data URI. The mark was a few hundred bytes when that choice was made and is three kilobytes now, which across twenty pages was a hundred kilobytes of the same icon.

0.9.0 — 2026-08-22

📐 Measurement

• 7.1 material reads 0.35 LU quieter, and correctly. The +1.5 dB surround weight was applied to every channel past the LFE, so a 7.1 stream had it on the rear pair as well as the side pair. BS.1770 gives it to the surround pair only — Report ITU-R BS.2217’s channel table states 7.1 as 1.00 / 1.00 / 1.00 / N/A / 1.41 / 1.41 / 1.00 / 1.00 — and the ITU’s own two 7.1 compliance files read 0.35 LU high against a ±0.1 tolerance until this was fixed; they now read −23.000 and −24.000 exactly. Only 7.1 and wider is affected: mono, stereo, quad, 5.0 and 5.1 never reached the arm that was wrong, and every reading from them is unchanged. Anything measured from a 7.1 master — its LUFS-I, LUFS-M, LUFS-S, LRA and the delivery verdict drawn from them — was 0.35 LU too loud and is worth re-measuring.
• Max M and Max S are found on a 10 ms grid, where momentary and short-term loudness previously advanced only every 100 ms. The official EBU test vectors caught this: Tech 3341 tests 13 and 14 slide a 400 ms tone — exactly one momentary window long — through twenty files in 20 ms steps and require Max M within ±0.1 LU of −23.0 every time. On a 100 ms grid a tone offset by anything else never lies inside one window whole, so sixteen of the twenty read low, by up to 0.45 LU, and test 14 by 0.70. Every Max M and Max S therefore rises rather than falls: on the EBU’s two authentic programme segments Max M rises by 0.16 and 0.11 LU and Max S by 0.02 and 0.01, and a transient that fell between the old grid points can rise by up to 0.7 LU. LUFS-I, LRA and its percentiles, TP Max and Peak Max are unchanged — identical to three decimals across all 70 files of the test set — because both gating windows are still filed every 100 ms, which is the 75% overlap BS.1770 asks for. Re-read a delivery decision that turned on Max M or Max S against a ceiling; one that turned on the integrated numbers stands.
• The spectrum analyser draws its bands tilted, at 4.5 dB per octave by default. The curve is rotated about 1 kHz, so 20 Hz is drawn 25.4 dB lower than it measures and 20 kHz 19.4 dB higher — 44.8 dB between the ends of the range, where previously the drawn level was the measured level at every frequency. It is a view: the offset is added per band at the moment of drawing, and Spectrum and Spectrum peak are published and sent over the wire exactly as the engine measured them, so nothing needs re-measuring. What changes is that a level read off the analyser’s own dB scale is only true at 1 kHz now, which is why the module prints the tilt it is drawing at and why Tilt: 0 dB/oct — where the scale is true everywhere — prints nothing.
• The analyser’s peak-hold line holds the drawn curve rather than the raw bands. It is the highest the curve has been, held for a second and a half and then let down at 12 dB a second, which is the schedule the engine’s own per-band hold already followed. Two consequences: the line moves with the curve instead of jumping to a peak the curve is still easing towards, and on Response: Slow it reads lower than it used to — by as much as the pole smoothed the transient away — because the curve it is holding never went there. Response: Fast holds every published frame and is the setting to find a click with. Spectrum peak itself is unchanged.
• The histogram draws both of its bands averaged over a second, where it previously drew every 100 ms column exactly as measured. Smoothing in its menu chooses Off — the old picture, byte for byte — Light at 0.5 s, Normal at 1.0 s or Broad at 2.0 s, and Normal is the default. The window is centred rather than trailing, so nothing moves along the time axis; what it costs is height on a short event. A transient the momentary band reached for a single column now reads lower by roughly the distance between that column and its neighbours — a 6 LU spike over a steady body reads about 1 LU above it on Normal — and the newest column at the right edge lags the live meters by up to half the window, settling as it ages. Nothing measured changes: the ring holds the columns as they arrived, the smoothing is applied on the way out every frame, and reports, the wire protocol and every other loudness module are untouched. Choose Off to find the loudest 100 ms in a programme.
• The loudness distribution’s fill no longer double-draws itself. Each of the 120 published bins was stroked half a pixel wider than its own spacing to keep butt caps from leaving seams, so every overlap was composited twice through the translucent gradient — a brighter line at all 119 bin boundaries, and on a default-sized module nearly a fifth of the fill drawn at double alpha. The bins are unchanged and none of them moves; what changes is that the drawn area is now a shape rather than a row of overlapping lines, and a column covering more than one bin takes the loudest of them rather than blending them, the way the engine already maps transform bins into spectrum bands.

✨ Added

• The oscilloscope locks to the DAW. Sync: Tempo makes the width a musical division — 4 bars down to 1/32, straight, triplet or dotted — and puts every sample in the column its position in the bar falls in, so each pass overwrites the last in place and a kick is drawn in the same spot every bar. The graticule divides into beats rather than tenths while it is locked, and the corner says which division is on screen. It uses the host’s own playhead, tempo and time signature, which the plugin already forwards: MIDI clock carries neither a bar position nor the accuracy, and is not involved. A source with no playhead — a sound card, or a DAW that reports none — draws the free window and labels it as the free window, because a display that said 1 bar over something else would be worse than one that is not synced.
• The spectrum analyser has a tilt, Tilt in its menu: 0, 1.5, 3, 4.5 or 6 dB per octave, rotated about 1 kHz. Programme material falls with frequency at something like 3 to 4.5 dB an octave, so an untilted analyser draws every mix ever made as the same ramp — bottom octaves against the ceiling, top octaves crushed into the floor — and spends most of its height on the one part of the picture that carries no information. Tilted, a mix is roughly horizontal and what is left is the deviation. The analyser prints the tilt it is drawing at, because a dB scale quietly rotated across its width is worse than no scale at all.
• The oscilloscope draws a stereo signal either as two lanes or with both channels around one centre line, from Stereo in its menu. Overlaid, the two are told apart by weight rather than by colour, and the trace gets the whole height of the module — which is the arrangement that shows what the channels are doing differently.
• The oscilloscope can be triggered by a transient. Trigger: Transient makes the display wait, armed, until the signal rises through a level you set, draw forward across the whole width once from that sample, and hold what it caught until the next crossing. It works at every time base — the roll above 200 ms is replaced by the sweep rather than left in place — so the attack of one kick can be looked at instead of a picture that lands somewhere different every pass. Trigger: Off, which is the default and what the module did before, is unchanged: a rising zero crossing below 200 ms, a rolling display above it, and always something on screen. A threshold nothing reaches leaves the last capture where it is, which is the mode working rather than failing. Trigger stays in the module’s menu under Sync: Tempo, greyed rather than dropped: a bar-locked window is placed by the bar line and has no use for it, and a row that vanishes is a row somebody hunts for. Grid is now greyed under Sync: Free for the same reason instead of being dropped — there is no triplet of a millisecond.
• The oscilloscope’s height and trigger threshold are sliders on the module, HEIGHT and THRESHOLD in a strip along the bottom of the plot, and the threshold is drawn across the lane at the height it is set to. Both are numbers over a wide range that are chosen by watching the waveform while they move, and a menu that closes over the waveform on every step cannot be used for that. The height goes from 1x to 32x, continuously rather than in named steps — a reverb tail thirty decibels under full scale is a flat line at 1x, and the setting that fits the material is rarely a round multiple. The strip is dropped on a module too short to spare the room, like the graticule and the lane letters, and is not drawn on a remote display, which has no layout to write to. Nothing measured changes: a sample is still marked as clipped only if it reached full scale, and a trace that runs off its lane is a trace that is zoomed.
• AUTO beside the threshold takes it from the loudest transient. It follows the largest positive excursion of the mid signal over the last two to four seconds — the quantity the trigger itself compares against — and sets the threshold six decibels under it, which is half the amplitude and so still inside the attack: the sweep starts before the transient rather than on top of it, which is what a threshold set exactly at the peak would do. The slider shows where the level has got to and stops answering while the box is checked; unchecking it keeps the number Auto found rather than snapping back to whatever was dragged before. Silence moves nothing — a passage nobody played is not a measurement, and a threshold dropped to the floor would arm the trigger on the noise underneath it.
• The histogram has a Smoothing setting — Off, Light, Normal or Broad. See the Measurement note above for what each one does to the picture and why the window is centred rather than trailing.
• The loudness distribution prints LRA. The module drew the picture behind the number for two phases without ever showing the number, so reading one off it meant putting a Number Box beside it. It is now on the bracket across the top, which is the distance the reading is.

⚡ Changed

• macOS 14.2 is now the stated requirement for the application, the VST3 and the Audio Unit, where the application claimed 10.15 and the plug-ins 11.0. Nothing is lost that worked: neither could load below 14.2 at all — see the Fixed entry. The installer refuses the volume under 14.2 rather than gating its plug-in rows, because there is no longer a version that can run one component and not another.
• Nothing crosses the loudness distribution’s plot except the target. The 10th and 95th percentiles were two full-height lines at the reading weight, and on steady material they and the dashed target line piled up within a few pixels of each other over the bars. The percentiles are now a bracket across the top strip carrying the LRA reading, with short end marks at the top and at the axis and the gated range shaded between them — so the distribution is the only thing in the plot, and the target, which is the one line the user chose, is the only line through it. The 10% and 95% labels are gone: the bracket’s ends are those percentiles and the number on it is the distance between them.
• The loudness distribution’s annotations are painted over the bars rather than under them. The percentile marks and their labels were drawn before the fill, so the translucent gradient was composited on top of the part of the module meant to be read first.
• The settings panel says what the source list actually offers. The note under the device picker still read “input devices only” and told macOS users to install BlackHole, sitting directly beneath a picker that has offered System Output since 0.8.0 — so the one sentence read at the moment of choosing said the feature was not there. It now names what each platform does, and says that macOS asks permission and reads silence if it is declined.
• Upgrading from 0.5.0 or earlier is documented as revoking every macOS permission, not just Local Network. The bundle identifier moved in 0.6.0 and macOS keys permissions to the identifier, so Microphone, Camera and System Audio Recording were revoked as well. System Audio Recording is the one worth checking first, because Apple’s refusal of it is silent — see the install page.
• The page switcher on a remote display’s link bar sits at the right-hand end of the bar, beside Disconnect, where it used to sit between the host’s name and its playhead readout. It no longer moves when the host gains or loses a DAW, or reports a tempo where another reports only a clock.
• The iPad display needs iPadOS 15 or later, where it previously needed 13. Apple stops accepting uploads built against anything below 15 in Spring 2027 and warns on every one until then, so the floor moves now rather than in the release that would otherwise have been refused. No iPad loses the display by this. iPadOS 13, 14 and 15 support exactly the same devices — every model back to the iPad Air 2 and the mini 4 — so what this excludes is an iPad that has not been updated, not an iPad that cannot be.
• Disconnecting a remote display lands back on the view it was opened from, rather than leaving the host picker on the screen. Leaving a display used to put it in its no-host state, and that state is the panel that asks which machine to attach to — so the one control marked as the way out asked a question instead of answering one. A display with nothing behind it, which is a tablet that opened straight into one, still lands on the picker, because there is nowhere else for it to go.
• The phase scope’s correlation bar and the super meter’s three rings have rounded ends. On the bar the fill is clipped to the same corners, so ±1 fills the rounded tip rather than sitting square over it. On the gauge it is the scale that is rounded, at both extremes of the sweep: a reading’s own moving end stays square, because a round tip is half a ring of ink standing past the number it points at, which on that scale is most of a decibel nobody measured. The M, S and I names step a little further round the open end to keep their clearance from ink the rings did not have before.
• Everything drawn against the delivery target is red above it. The LUFS meter’s momentary and short-term bars and the super meter’s three arcs are now cut at the target and drawn in over past it, where they were one colour from the floor to the reading. The histogram and the loudness distribution already split at the target and already used over, so their picture is unchanged. One rule in four modules, and red is the single mark for past the number you set. The cut is a clip at the target rather than a verdict on the whole shape, so what it shows is how much of the reading is over — a momentary peak 3 LU above a −14 target is three quarters grey with a red cap, not a red bar.
• The histogram’s outline turns red past the delivery target, where it stayed the accent colour across the whole programme. The fill under it already split there, so the line the eye lands on ran one colour straight through the boundary and disagreed with the area it bounds. Cut at the target like everything else, on the same pixel row as the fill.
• The super meter’s innermost ring no longer turns entirely red when the mix is over its target. The ring takes its verdict’s colour for its whole length — which is what makes an in-spec reading a green ring rather than a green tip — and once over-target became a red verdict that meant the arc ran red from the bottom of the scale to the reading, with its own target tick stranded in the middle of it and the same colour on both sides. At −11 against a −14 target, three quarters of the arc claimed to be over when a quarter of it was. It is now drawn like the other two rings: neutral up to the target, red past it, so the red segment is the size of the miss. In spec it is still green end to end, and the centre readout is red either way.
• The super meter’s three target ticks read as one mark, and are drawn at 3 px rather than 2. The same grey on three rings is not the same appearance: the backdrop at the target is the track on a ring that has not reached it, that ring’s fill on one that has, and red on the far side of the line — measured at L* 24, 39 and 51 in one ordinary frame, so a single grey stood +36, +21 and +9 above what surrounded it and read as three different greys. No choice of shade fixes that, because the backdrop moves with the audio, so each tick is now laid in a slot of the meter’s own track colour — the mark reads as cut back to the empty scale, and a ring that has not reached the target shows no notch at all, because there is nothing there to cut. Local contrast is +36 on all three rings at every reading and under every skin. The extra weight is because the mark is radial: antialiasing spreads it across two pixel columns where an axis-aligned rule lands on whole ones, and it now has red on one side of it as well.

🐛 Fixed

• A mix over its loudness target is red in the Number Box and the Alert Meter, where it used to be drawn as a reading with no opinion. LUFS-I past the target and its tolerance returned a neutral state, so the delivery report called the same mix a failure while the meter beside it printed the number in plain text — and the bars and arcs that cut at the target now paint that region red, which made the disagreement plain. Under the target is still neutral: quiet is not over. Amber is unchanged and still means approaching — true peak inside the last decibel before the ceiling is the case it exists for. The rule now has a test; it had none, which is how this stood for eight phases.

• The macOS application and its plug-ins load again on every macOS they claim to support, and the floor is now 14.2. The engine holds a strong reference to CATapDescription — the Core Audio class behind System Output — and a strong reference to a class that does not exist is a library dyld cannot resolve. Below macOS 14.2 the entire engine library therefore failed to load, so the application died at launch and a DAW found the plug-in absent, on every version between the old floor and 14.2. Nothing degraded to “no system capture”; it was all or nothing. The application previously declared 10.15 and the plug-ins 11.0, both of which were promises the binaries could not keep, and the library itself was being compiled at 13.0 by a build flag that ignored either setting. All three are 14.2 now, engine/src/oaa_tap.h fails the build if any of them is lowered again, and the five unguarded-availability warnings the old floor produced are gone.

• The super meter’s target ticks read as marks rather than as rendering artefacts. All three are drawn at the emphasis weight now. They are radial, so unlike every other target mark in the application they cannot be drawn with antialiasing off and land on whole pixels — at the mark weight the same 1.5 px was spread across two pixel columns at about half the alpha each, which is a deliberate annotation with half the contrast of the ones it was matched to.

• Backspace, Delete and the arrow keys work inside the tab rename field. Renaming a tab, the keys that edit text did nothing at all: Backspace and Delete are bound to “delete the selected module” and the arrows to “move the selected module”, and the guard that was supposed to stand these aside while a text field has focus was checked one layer too late. CallbackShortcuts reports a key handled the moment its activator matches, whatever the callback then decides, so the keystroke was consumed and never reached Flutter’s own text editing bindings. Typing was unaffected throughout, which is why this was easy to miss and infuriating to hit: a name could be entered but not corrected. The guarded chords are now absent from the map while a field has focus rather than present and declining.

• An alert meter’s latch can be cleared again after the source has gone quiet. The latch holds the worst reading since the last reset and is cleared by the elapsed clock running backwards, which is what a reset looks like. A link that goes quiet reports its elapsed time as “not a number”, that value was stored, and every later comparison against it was false — so the lamp stayed lit for the rest of the session, across every source selected afterwards. It now ignores a non-number rather than remembering one.

• A remote display no longer receives one frame of the previous source’s audio. The waveform collected for the tablet was not dropped when the desktop switched sources, so up to one publish interval of the old programme was sent spliced onto the front of the new one’s first frame — a join the display had no way to know about.

• The oscilloscope’s trace no longer comes apart at short time bases. From about 20 ms to 100 ms across the width, one or two samples land in each column of the display, so each was drawn as a dot a pixel tall with nothing joining it to its neighbours — a waveform that arrived on screen as a dashed line. Columns now reach to the one before them, which draws the connecting line a per-sample trace would have drawn anyway, and the picture is snapped to whole pixels so its density no longer flickers sample by sample. Below 10 ms, where the display is one point per sample, the trace is a single joined polyline instead of a segment per sample; independent segments were composited independently and the line read as chewed.

• The Super Meter’s arcs no longer step ten times a second. Momentary, short-term and integrated loudness advance on the engine’s 100 ms gating grid, and the meters repaint at about 47 Hz — so four frames in five drew the arcs exactly where the frame before had left them and the fifth jumped, which on a gauge that size reads as an instrument stuttering. The arcs now travel between readings over 50 ms, which is half the gap between them and an eighth of the shortest window any of the three measures. No reading changes: every number the module prints, and the pass or fail colour it takes, is the measurement drawn the frame it arrives.

• The playhead and the elapsed clock in the status bar are packed left, like the pair on a remote display’s link bar, and the gap between them is the same seam as every other one in the row. Both used to sit in boxes reserved for the widest thing they could ever print — a drop-frame timecode, eleven glyphs — so a host counting bars left 56 px of nothing beside its own counter, and the elapsed clock another 14. The boxes are the width of what is in them now.

• The rule between items in a menu is no longer drawn in pure white. Material’s outlineVariant — the colour a Material 3 divider actually reads — was never named in the theme, and a ColorScheme role left unset falls back to a foreground colour: #FFFFFF under a dark skin and #000000 under a light one. So the rules in the signal-source menu were brighter than any colour a skin defines and brighter than the text beside them. They are the hairline every other division in the application uses, at the graticule weight rather than the border weight so they still read against the raised surface a menu is drawn on.

• A module’s settings no longer look like entries that cannot be chosen. The Metric, Response and Time base rows in a module’s menu were drawn in muted text to mark them as settings rather than actions, directly above a Duplicate at full brightness — which is what a disabled item looks like everywhere else in the interface, including in the menu one row up. They are the same colour as every other row now, and a rule separates them from Duplicate and Delete instead.

• A module setting reads Time base: 50 ms where it read Time base — 50 ms. An em dash between a setting and its value is the punctuation this interface uses for a value that was never measured, and a menu row is the one place that reading is available.

• The oscilloscope on a remote display draws a continuous waveform. It could not before, at either of the two slower link rates, and the reason was structural rather than a slip: a snapshot carried one analysis block — 1,024 frames, 21.3 ms at 48 kHz — while a link at 30 Hz stands for 1,600 frames of audio and one at 15 Hz for 3,200. The module worked out how much audio had elapsed, correctly concluded its buffer was no longer contiguous, and cleared it. On every single frame. Nothing logged anything and no test failed; it simply would not draw, and only the 60 fps rate escaped it. The host now accumulates what it measured between two sends and says how much that is, so the trace is continuous at 15, 30 and 60. Above 48 kHz on the slowest rate more audio can elapse than one frame may carry, and the shortfall is drawn as the gap it is rather than filled in.

• A remote display honours the system’s reduce-motion preference. It ignored it entirely and redrew at 60 fps whatever the tablet had been asked for — the desktop reads that preference in its status bar, and a display has no status bar. It now caps at 30 fps when the platform asks, like every other screen. Choosing the display’s own refresh rate from the tablet is still not possible; the setting exists but nothing on that screen writes it.

• The phase scope costs less than half what it did to draw, which is felt on a tablet before anywhere else. It was 9.6 ms of rasterising per frame on an Apple Silicon Mac — over half a 60 fps budget for one module — and is now 3.3 ms, from switching off antialiasing that a 1.4 px dot in a cloud of tens of thousands gains nothing from, and from drawing the dimmest half of the trail more sparsely than the half you actually read. The trail is the same length, fades over the same time, and is still computed exactly rather than compounded through an 8-bit surface. The figure it draws is unchanged; the faintest edge of the cloud is very slightly sparser.

• A remote display uses less than half the network it did. The measurement frame is 7,648 bytes where it was 15,056, so a tablet at the default 30 Hz link rate now costs about 230 kB/s instead of 452 kB/s, and 406 kB/s instead of 904 kB/s at 60 Hz. The five arrays that exist only to be drawn — the spectrum, its peak hold, its pan, the scope and the histogram — travel as fixed point instead of 32-bit floats, at a resolution between two and four orders of magnitude finer than the pixels they land on. No number you read changes: every scalar, and the per-channel peak, RMS, VU and clip figures, are carried exactly as before. This is wire protocol version 4, so a tablet and a desktop must be on the same release to link — a mismatch is refused at connect with a sentence naming both. A plugin already installed in your DAW keeps working with a newer app, as it did before.

  The waveform is the one thing that got bigger: it is now carried at the rate it was measured rather than one block a frame (see the oscilloscope entry under Fixed), which costs about 190 kB/s at 48 kHz whatever the link rate. Net of that, 30 Hz is still down by a third and 60 Hz by more than half; 15 Hz is the one rate that costs slightly more than it did, and it is the rate that was most broken.

🚧 Internal

• packages/oaa_engine/test/vectors_test.dart runs the two official vector sets through the decoder and the engine: the EBU Loudness Test Set — every case in Table 1 of Tech 3341 and of Tech 3342 — and the compliance material of Report ITU-R BS.2217. 112 cases, all passing, and each group skips unless OAA_VECTORS or OAA_VECTORS_ITU names an unzipped copy. Not a gate, because neither set may be redistributed here and fetching 811 MB would put the network in front of the one suite that must never be flaky; the generated cases in conformance_test.dart remain the gate, and now assert the 7.1 weights too, since no official file can be committed to hold them. Both measurement entries above are what the first run found.
• The six ITU files wider than 7.1 — 10, 12 and 24 channels — are asserted to be refused rather than measured. The engine carries eight channels and has no weights for those layouts, so a number would be worse than an error.
• Decoding a snapshot was measured and cleared as a cause of a slow tablet: 4 µs a frame against a 33,000 µs budget at the default link rate. It was briefly rewritten as nine block copies, eleven times faster and worth nothing; protocol version 4 then made that impossible anyway, because fixed-point arrays have to be converted element by element rather than moved. Recorded because the wire was the obvious suspect and was the wrong one — the cost was in a single module’s rasterising, two benchmarks away.
• tool/bench_wire.dart and tool/bench_modules.dart measure the two halves of what a remote display costs — decoding a frame, and drawing it — with recording and rasterising reported separately, because they are different costs on different threads and the interesting one is not always the one being measured.
• tool/bench_gpu.dart measures the same modules on a real GPU, off the engine’s own frame timings in a profile build. It exists because the software rasteriser flutter test uses overstated the phase scope by two and a half times and reordered the table under it — the module that needed the work was still the one at the top, but no figure from a software backend was worth quoting.
• Every benchmark now reports how many pixels it inked, and fails or says so loudly when that is none. The harness had drifted from the wire layout it was writing by hand and stopped drawing altogether, while still reporting timings that were low, stable and entirely plausible; it was caught by somebody looking at the window rather than by anything in the suite. The material is now built through the real encoder and decoder — tool/bench_material.dart — so there is no second implementation of the protocol to drift.
• website/ holds open-audio-analyzer.com: a static Astro site, deployed by hand to Cloudflare Workers, in this repository rather than beside it because its content is derived from the code next to it. The numbers on its front page are measured at build time by website/scripts/measure.mjs rather than typed, and the fourteen thumbnails in its module catalogue are photographs of the real widgets, taken from package:oaa by website/tools/module-renderer — an approximation of a measurement display is the one picture this project should not publish. No job in ci.yml builds it or deploys it, and nothing in a release contains it.

0.8.0 — 2026-08-22

✨ Added

• An Oscilloscope module: the waveform itself, in a lane per channel. Its one control is a time base, from 5 ms to 5 s, and it sets both how much time the width holds and how the window is found — below 200 ms the display is triggered on a rising zero crossing, so a periodic signal stands still and can be read, and above it the display rolls right to left the way a DAW draws a waveform. Anything that reached full scale is drawn in the over colour, so a clipped passage is a red band rather than a flat top somebody has to notice. It measures nothing the previous thirteen modules did not: the samples were already published, and it works on a tablet unchanged.
• The oscilloscope leaves a gap where audio was measured and never published — a file pushed through faster than real time, or a device that overran. The alternative is drawing the samples that happen to be at hand across the whole stretch, which is a picture of a programme that never played, at the right amplitude and in the right place.

⚡ Changed

• The default layout’s Spectrum tab carries the oscilloscope across its full width. The analyser and the three displays below it are a row shorter each to make room. A layout you have already arranged is untouched — the canvas as you left it is what reopens.

🚧 Internal

• The meter clock now acquires the engine’s snapshot on every tick and throttles only the repaint. The frame-rate setting still does what it says — at 30 fps the meters rasterise thirty times a second — but a measurement is no longer lost between two of them. The engine’s snapshot has one slot, so anything a reader does not take before the next publish is gone; that cost the old arrangement one measurement in three at 30 fps against a 47 Hz publish rate. The oscilloscope is the first module for which that is a hole rather than a coarser picture, and it reads the new unthrottled channel.

0.7.0 — 2026-08-22

✨ Added

• Pairing a display by camera. The sending machine shows a QR code under the code button beside PUBLISH in its status bar, and a tablet reads it under Scan a QR code on the screen it opens with. It carries the address and the port and nothing else, so a display that scans one can still only watch. This is the route that works where discovery does not — a venue or a guest network that blocks multicast previously left somebody reading four numbers off a laptop across the room and typing them into a tablet.
• The pairing code names which network interface it is for, on a machine with more than one. A laptop on Wi-Fi with a dock has two addresses and only one of them may be reachable from the tablet, which is not knowable from the sending side.
• Scanning is offered on Android, iPadOS and macOS. Windows and Linux have no camera implementation, so the row is absent there rather than present and refusing; the typed address is offered on every platform, as before.
• The macOS, Windows and Linux downloads now install the plug-in for you, with a checkbox that starts ticked. macOS offers the VST3 and the Audio Unit as separate rows, Windows and Linux the VST3; unticking leaves the application on its own. Previously the plug-in was a bare archive and the instructions for placing it by hand ran to a screenful, most of which existed because a bundle in the wrong folder and a bundle that failed to load look identical from inside a DAW.
• A plug-in installed by the macOS package needs no xattr step. Files placed by an installer are not quarantined, so the Gatekeeper refusal that has no override — the one a DAW reports as “could not verify … is free of malware” — does not arise.
• The Windows installer registers an uninstaller under Settings → Apps, which removes the plug-in as well as the application.
• A third Linux download, a tarball, beside the AppImage and the flatpak. It is the only one of the three that carries the VST3: unpack it and run ./install.sh, which needs no root and writes under your home directory unless you ask it for --system.
• The Linux tarball’s install.sh is its uninstaller too, and takes --vst3, --no-vst3, --system and --uninstall for use without a prompt.

⚡ Changed

• The remote display is reached from the status bar in one press, from either end. REMOTE and the panel behind it are gone. In their place the bar carries a PUBLISH switch, a button beside it showing the pairing code, and ATTACH, which opens Show another machine directly. Publishing no longer takes three presses and a question about which end of the link this machine is — a question anybody pressing the button had already answered.
• The remote display’s name, port, update rate and pairing code are now in Settings under Publish, with the rest of what the application remembers, instead of in a modal of their own. The section also states whether it is publishing and how many displays are attached, which the switch has no room to print.
• The name and port commit when the edit ends — on Enter or on leaving the field — rather than from an Apply button. Nothing else in the settings panel has one.
• The pairing code’s button is disabled, rather than absent, while publishing is off. A code nothing is listening at is a display that scans, connects and times out, which reads as a broken feature rather than as a switch that is not on.
• The pairing-code mark is redrawn on Material’s qr_code geometry: three finders and a scatter of data cells. The previous mark was five filled cells in a 3x3 grid, which reads as a dice face.
• A module’s title bar and its corner resize grip now accept a finger from a larger area than they draw: 40 px down from the top edge instead of the 24 px bar, and a 32 px corner square instead of a 16 px one. Both were well under the 44 pt and 48 dp the platforms ask for, which made a module fiddly to move and harder still to resize on a tablet. Nothing on screen changed size, and neither did anything for a mouse, a trackpad or a stylus-free pointer — the larger targets are admitted to touch and stylus only.
• A tap on a module’s resize grip selects the module. It previously did nothing: the grip is opaque, so it took the tap from the module underneath it and had nothing of its own to do with it.
• A typed address that is not an address now says so, instead of the Connect button appearing to do nothing. A mistyped port — 192.168.1.20:70000 — was previously read as a host name with a colon in it and dialled, which failed several seconds later as a name lookup, and an unbracketed IPv6 literal was split at its last colon into a host and a port that could never connect.
• The macOS download is an installer package rather than a disk image, and the Windows download is an installer executable rather than an msix. Neither original format can install a plug-in: a disk image has no install step at all, and an msix’s virtualised filesystem cannot write the shared VST3 directory.
• The Windows installer is not yet signed, so Windows shows “Windows protected your PC” and the user clicks More info → Run anyway. The msix it replaces was refused outright when unsigned, so this is a state a user can get past rather than one they cannot.

🐛 Fixed

• Publishing to a tablet no longer stops following the desk when the window is narrowed. The status bar drops whole items rather than squeezing them, and everything that fed the display host ran inside the item it dropped — so past that width the socket went on streaming measurements while layout, skin and delivery-target changes stopped arriving, and a changed name, port or rate was never adopted. Nothing said so, and the tablet looked healthy throughout.
• The status bar no longer overflows its own row while publishing at narrow window widths. The remote button’s label grew from REMOTE to REMOTE · ON when it was switched on — 27 px the width gate below it had never been measured against, because the sweep that proves the bar fits never published. The switch that replaced it is the same width in both states.
• A warning that no display will find this machine no longer flashes on screen for a second every time publishing is switched on. The first announcement of a session is often refused before the multicast join settles and succeeds on the next one a second later; the notice now waits for the responder’s opening burst to finish before it says anything, and clears immediately.
• Publishing that could not start — the usual cause is a second copy of Open Audio Analyzer already running — now says so on screen. The switch flicked on and back off under the pointer with the reason recorded nowhere anybody was looking.
• A desktop that cannot announce itself on the network now says so, on the Remote row and in the panel behind it, instead of reading Publishing while no tablet ever lists it. The advertisement had no error reporting at all: its bind error, its send error and its socket’s error stream were all discarded, and the last of those is the one a refused local-network permission arrives on. Nothing about the machine looked wrong either, because the permission blocks the announcement and not the port — a display given the address by hand connected and worked perfectly throughout.
• macOS users upgrading from 0.5.0 or earlier have to allow local network access again. 0.6.0 changed the bundle identifier from dev.openaudioanalyzer.oaa to com.openaudioanalyzer.oaa, and macOS keys the permission to the identifier — so the entry granted to the old application no longer applies to this one and tablets stop finding the desk. Allow Open Audio Analyzer under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Local Network. Presets, skins and paired hosts are unaffected; they are keyed by name, not by identifier.
• A panel now moves clear of a tablet’s software keyboard. Every panel stayed centred on the whole screen while the keyboard covered the bottom third of it, so the address field in Show another machine — the last row above the footer — was behind the keyboard together with the caret and everything typed into it. Panels make room for the keyboard now, and the field being typed into is scrolled in front of whoever is typing.
• The DAW’s playhead no longer floats loose in the middle of the status bar. Its box reserves the width of a timecode, so a host that counts bars and beats instead — 1|1.0 — filled a third of it and left the rest as a hole on the right, while on the left the sample rate and channel count printed flush against the reading at every window between about 1160 px and 1310 px. The playhead now sits one gap from the elapsed clock it is read beside, and a group’s width away from the format readout at every window size.
• A tablet’s page tabs now sit beside the name of the machine they belong to. The playhead was in front of them, and it reserves room for a timecode, a tempo and a time signature whether or not the host at the other end keeps all three — so on a host counting bars the tabs stood 88 px clear of the reading with nothing between the two, and on one reporting a clock and no tempo 190 px, reading as a control floating in the middle of the bar. The tabs come first now, and nothing that appears, vanishes or reserves unused room can move them.
• The Linux VST3 now loads on the same distributions as the Linux application. It was built against a newer glibc than everything shipped beside it, so on an older distribution it was simply absent from the DAW’s plug-in browser with nothing logged — indistinguishable from having installed it in the wrong place. Affects every release that shipped a Linux plug-in.

🔥 Removed

• The Remote panel, and the Send these meters panel behind it. Both ends of the link are controls in the status bar now, and what those panels configured is in Settings → Publish.
• The macOS .dmg and the Windows .msix. Their replacements are above, and each installs a superset of what the one it replaces did.

🚧 Internal

• Turning the remote display off publishes its state before it closes its sockets rather than after. Both closes suspend and dispose does not wait for them, so a service that had been publishing wrote to a disposed ValueNotifier from inside a microtask — visible only in the console, and only ever reached by a service that had actually been switched on.
• A release no longer carries artifact.tar, an unlabelled tarball of the documentation site that has been attached to every release since 0.3.0. The publish step downloads every artefact the run produced, and the Pages action gives its payload that fixed name.
• The signing keychain accepts a .p12 carrying both Developer ID certificates, grants productbuild and productsign use of the key, and verifies what it imported against the identities the job asked for instead of printing a summary that could not show an installer certificate at all.
• The macOS package turns off bundle relocation. Left on, the Installer asks Spotlight where the application already lives and writes the update there — so a stale copy in ~/Downloads would receive it while /Applications kept the old version, and the install would report success.
• The five packaging jobs in ci.yml are named for the platform and the artefact they produce — macos-pkg, windows-installer, linux-tarball, linux-appimage and linux-flatpak — where a format, a platform and a container had been three naming schemes for one family of jobs.
• The plugin and CLI artefacts are named by platform rather than by runner image. Three installer jobs download the plugin bundles by name, and the name was oaa-plugin-ubuntu-22.04 — the image is pinned for glibc reasons and moving it would have failed those downloads rather than the job that moved it.
• OAA_IOS_TEAM_ID now reaches the iPad build. The Runner target’s Release configuration set its own DEVELOPMENT_TEAM, which outranks the xcconfig make_ipa.sh writes, so a profile created under any other team was installed and valid and Xcode looked for it under the project’s team instead — the archive failed and no build could reach TestFlight. make_ipa.sh also compares the profile’s team against the build’s before archiving, as its fourth pre-build check.
• The test that holds the two ends of the link to different advice no longer asserts it on the one path that writes no advice at all. Outside macOS a refused multicast send is reported as its errno, by both ends, because the errno is the only fact there is — so the assertion passed on the machine it was written on and failed the Linux job.

0.6.0 — 2026-08-22

✨ Added

• macOS releases can be notarised, which is what lets a downloaded plugin or dmg be opened with no further steps. A Developer ID signature now also carries the hardened runtime and a secure timestamp, both of which Apple requires before it will notarise anything and neither of which was being requested.
• Tagging a release now builds the iPadOS display and uploads it to TestFlight, so a tablet no longer has to be built from source to be updated. The upload runs after the release is published rather than before it, which means a TestFlight build always corresponds to a release that exists. The IPA itself is deliberately not attached to the release: an App Store build provisions no devices, so a downloaded copy could not be installed by anyone.
• The iPadOS build declares that it uses no encryption. Without that declaration every TestFlight build waits in “Missing Compliance” until somebody answers the export question by hand, which is the one step an automatic upload cannot take.

⚡ Changed

• The application identifier is now com.openaudioanalyzer.oaa, and the plugin’s is com.openaudioanalyzer.oaa.plugin. Both were under dev., which reversed a domain nobody held; these reverse open-audio-analyzer.com. The hyphens do not survive the trip, and cannot: an Android applicationId and a Kotlin package are Java identifiers and reject -, while Apple’s CFBundleIdentifier accepts only letters, digits, - and . and so rejects the _ that Android would want in its place. Stripping them is the one form that is legal on all six platforms. The Linux application id, the AppStream and flatpak ids, the msix identity and the hicolor icon filenames all move with it.

🐛 Fixed

• The macOS plugin bundles are built for Apple silicon and Intel, and load on macOS 11 and later. Every release up to 0.5.0 shipped a bundle built for whichever machine the release ran on — Apple silicon only, and requiring that machine’s own macOS version or newer — which a DAW reports in exactly the way it reports a plugin that was never installed.
• The instructions for a downloaded macOS plugin now describe what macOS 15 and later actually do when the quarantine flag is still on it: a modal saying the plugin cannot be verified free of malware, or that it will damage your computer, with nothing in System Settings to override it — the “Open Anyway” button there is only offered for a blocked launch, and loading a plugin into a DAW is a library load. The fix has not changed and is still xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine; what was wrong was the description of the symptom, which called the failure silent and sent people looking for a different problem.
• The README no longer claims the macOS build is distributed “signed with a Developer ID and notarised”. It has never been either.

🚧 Internal

• CI imports a signing certificate before anything signs. OAA_SIGNING_IDENTITY was being handed to codesign on runners whose keychain was empty, and OAA_NOTARY_PROFILE named a credential that only exists on a developer’s own machine, so neither secret could have worked on a runner — and neither failed a job, because they had never been set and the scripts took their no-credential branches instead.
• packaging/ios/make_ipa.sh and packaging/ios/testflight.sh, and the ipa and testflight jobs in ci.yml. Manual signing is injected through ios/Flutter/Release.xcconfig so the Xcode project stays on automatic signing for local development; the script reads the signing authority back off the archive, because flutter build ipa exits 0 on an export that silently fell back to automatic signing.

0.5.0 — 2026-08-22

✨ Added

• Double-clicking the status bar on macOS zooms the window again, as double-clicking a title bar does everywhere else on the Mac — the status bar is this window’s title bar, and it had answered nothing since 0.3.0. It obeys the system’s “double-click a window’s title bar to” setting, so a Mac set to minimise minimises and one set to do nothing does nothing, and it waits the double-click interval that Mac was configured with. No control in the row answers any later for it: what Flutter recognises there is still a single click, and the pair is counted in the runner.

⚡ Changed

• The iOS and Android home screen label is OAA, the wordmark the status bar already draws. It was Open Audio Analyzer, which no tablet ever actually showed: iOS fits an icon label to the width of one icon by tightening the tracking before it truncates, and tracking is spent on the spaces between words first — a 19-character name arrived on the home screen as OpenAudioAnal…, run together and cut short anyway. Apple’s guidance is twelve characters. The product’s name is unchanged everywhere it fits: the macOS, Windows and Linux applications, both permission prompts, and every configuration directory — nothing a tablet has saved moves.

🐛 Fixed

• The canvas no longer gets slower the longer a spectrogram is on screen. The spectrogram redrew its whole history as run-length marks on every published frame, and its cost was budgeted against smooth columns — real material jitters a brightness step between most adjacent rows, so a large display was re-recording and re-rasterising 150,000–230,000 marks about 47 times a second, a cost that ramped for the half-minute the history took to fill after a mount and then stayed. Every meter repaints from the same clock, so it dragged the whole canvas — most visibly the analyser — and the remote display paid the same price on weaker hardware, more of it at the 60 fps link rate. The history is now kept as pixels and drawn as one image, a quarter of a millisecond per published frame whatever the signal does; the numbers are in tool/bench_spectrogram.dart.
• On a remote display, the tab control now sits beside the name of the machine being watched instead of stranded in the middle of the link bar. The bar kept room for the host’s playhead whether or not the host had one, so on every host with no DAW behind it — a desktop metering a device or a file, which is most of them — 248 px of nothing stood between the name and the tabs. The slot appears with the playhead and does not move again while the link lasts, so a reading that goes stale does not shift the tabs out from under your finger.

🚧 Internal

• tool/bench_spectrogram.dart is formatted the way the test job’s dart format --set-exit-if-changed step demands. It was not, so that job failed on every push after the benchmark landed while the analyzer, the suites and the benchmark itself all stayed green. That step is now listed with the other gates in README.md and CLAUDE.md, which is why it was never run by hand.

0.4.1 — 2026-08-22

🐛 Fixed

• The macOS plugin bundles now carry a valid code signature. All three — the VST3, the Audio Unit and the Standalone — shipped with an invalid one in every release up to 0.4.0: the VST3’s resource seal was computed before JUCE wrote moduleinfo.json into the bundle, and the other two were never bundle-signed at all. On Apple Silicon that is enough for a DAW to leave the plugin out of its browser without logging anything, and for auval to refuse the Audio Unit. Each bundle is now signed after everything that writes into it and verified on the spot, so the build fails rather than producing a bundle it cannot verify. auval -v aufx OaaM OaaA passes. If the plugin never appeared in your DAW, this is why — and on macOS also strip com.apple.quarantine from a copy you downloaded, which no build can do for you.

✨ Added

• The documentation site’s Install page now has an In a DAW section: which folder the VST3 and the Audio Unit have to be copied into on each platform, the xattr line that a downloaded copy needs on macOS, and the Ableton Live preference that has to be on before Live looks in the folder at all. The page had linked to that section since the site was first published, and the section did not exist.

🚧 Internal

• OAA_CODESIGN_IDENTITY signs the macOS plugin bundles with a Developer ID instead of ad-hoc. Releases stay ad-hoc.
• Signing runs from a target that depends on the format target rather than from POST_BUILD, which is not last: a MACOSX_PACKAGE_LOCATION resource is copied by a sibling rule that make may run after the link, and on a from-scratch build it does. Only visible with the bundle deleted first.

0.4.0 — 2026-08-21

✨ Added

• An Android tablet now finds hosts on the network by itself, like every other platform. It held a multicast socket that never received an answer, because Android’s Wi-Fi driver discards multicast for an app that is not holding a WifiManager.MulticastLock — silently, with the search still saying it was looking. The lock is held while a search is running and given back when it stops, so it costs nothing once a display is attached.
• An Android tablet now remembers its layout, its skin and the host it was last attached to. Nothing in an Android process names a directory it may write to, so the configuration directory is asked for over a platform channel and lives in the app’s own files directory; every launch before this one started from the defaults.
• Metering your Mac’s own output no longer needs a loopback driver. On macOS 14.2 and later, System Output is the first entry in the source menu, named after the output device it is metering. It is a Core Audio process tap, so there is nothing to install, nothing to reroute and no password prompt — the audio still reaches your speakers while it is being measured. macOS may ask for permission to record system audio the first time. Below 14.2 the entry is absent and BlackHole or Loopback is still the answer; Windows and Linux are unaffected, since WASAPI loopback and a PipeWire monitor source already appear in the list.

⚡ Changed

• The wire protocol is at version 3, and a receiver now accepts any version it knows rather than only its own. A plugin built against 0.3.0 keeps working with a newer app, which under the old equality check it would not have: a plugin lives in the DAW’s plugin folder and stays there across app upgrades, so the mismatch was the ordinary case, and what it looked like from the plugin was a port that accepts and hangs up forever — indistinguishable from the defect where the port was never bound at all. The rule is one-way on purpose: a peer newer than this build is still refused, because a later version may have moved a table and misreading a measurement table is how a meter draws a confident wrong number. A tablet still running 0.3.0 or earlier will refuse a newer desktop and say so, rather than drawing anything; update both ends. Version 3 adds a frame type and moves no byte of any existing table — held by a test that decodes the frozen version-2 golden and diffs it against the version-3 one, where exactly four bytes differ and all four are version fields.
• A host search that is running but cannot receive says so instead of “Looking for hosts on this network…”, which is the face a search that is about to succeed wears.

🐛 Fixed

• The plugin’s status panel no longer claims a playhead from a host that is not giving one. The line was drawn from whether a transport had ever been published, and the plugin publishes one for every audio block — the empty one that means “this host said nothing” included — so it read as a playhead the moment audio started flowing, on precisely the host it exists to warn about. It now follows what the host is reporting now, and says “no playhead from host” again if a host stops.

🚧 Internal

• Groundwork for the Elapsed and Timecode LUFS modes, which are not yet offered by any module — this is the protocol and the engine underneath them, and the modules and their menu are the change after this one. docs/WIRE.md gains 0x0020 SET_LUFS_MODE, the first frame that travels from consumer to producer, permitted on the ingest port only because that one binds loopback where whatever connects is already running as this user; the display port binds every interface and stays read-only until somebody designs authentication for it. Three implementations moved together, as that file requires.
• The engine can reset itself when the signal returns after a silence (oaa_engine_set_silence_reset, ABI 5), which is what the System mode is made of. It lives in engine/ rather than above it because silence is a property of audio and not of a host — one implementation serves a plugin and a sound card, where two would eventually disagree about when a track began. The gate runs before the block it judges, so a track whose loudest sample is in its first block keeps that peak rather than having it cleared by its own reset. Off by default, and off for file analysis, which must measure a file whole. The two transport-driven modes need no engine API at all: they are the producer declining to push, so engine/ still does not learn what a DAW is.
• The plugin’s answer to a host that supplies no transport is now held by a test. plugin/test/transport_capture_test.cpp hosts the AudioProcessor directly, which is the only way to reach either of the two branches behind it: no VST3 or Audio Unit host can express “no playhead” or “no position”, so neither a DAW nor the fake DAW can ask for them. It runs in the gated plugin job’s ctest, and both it and the transport box’s own test were verified by breaking the code under them and watching them fail.
• Five documents caught up with protocol version 3’s two goldens. docs/WIRE.md still gave the SNAPSHOT payload size “at protocol version 2” in the one document whose header declares version 3; packages/oaa_wire/AGENTS.md named wire_v2.bin as the golden its codec test decodes, when the test reads both and wire_v3.bin is the one tracking the current serialiser; and two comments in ci.yml credited the C++ producing side with writing wire_v2.bin, which it no longer does. The one that could have cost something: the regeneration command in plugin/test/wire_fixture.cpp still wrote to wire_v2.bin — the frozen file whose whole purpose is to hold bytes produced before version 3 promised to move no table. Following it would have destroyed the evidence and left every test green.
• Two claims about that branch are corrected here rather than in the 0.3.0 notes, which are released. It is not reached by the Standalone build — JUCE 8’s AudioProcessorPlayer installs a counting playhead whenever the processor it is given has none — and it is unreachable through an Audio Unit as well, not only through VST3. The plugin’s own handling was correct throughout; only the note about what exercised it was wrong. README.md no longer lists it under Known gaps, because it now has a test instead of a paragraph.

0.3.0 — 2026-08-21

📐 Measurement

• The clip indicator now catches clipping. clip is the longest run of consecutive full-scale samples since the last reset, latched until Reset; it was the run still in progress at the block boundary, which is zero for every clip that ended inside the block — almost all of them. A run of 40 full-scale samples in the middle of a 1024-frame block published 0. The Digital Meter’s clip lamp is drawn from this, so it was dark for real clipping, which reads as proof that nothing clipped. No other reading changes; nothing that was reported as clipped is now reported as clean.
• Crest is now taken over the block being measured rather than from the values the meters draw. Both operands were the displayed peak and RMS, which carry a 1.5 s hold and a 300 ms averager, so the figure described the ballistics: a single block of DC at 0.9 read 11.6 dB where the answer is 0, and 0.43 s after a transient it read 17.8 dB and was still climbing. A steady sine reads 3.0103 dB either way, which is why the test suite never caught it. Re-measure anything whose crest you recorded from a moving signal — readings on transient material fall, typically by several dB, and were previously too high. Multichannel now reports the peakiest channel rather than the loudest peak minus the loudest RMS, which could describe no channel at all.

✨ Added

• A DAW’s playhead now reaches a tablet. The desktop decoded the plugin’s transport frame and kept it: bars, beats, tempo, time signature and timecode stopped at the desktop, so a remote display showed a plugin’s meters beside no position at all. It is relayed to every attached display now — on change rather than with every measurement, so a parked session costs nothing, and replayed when a display attaches so that one joining a parked session is not left blank until somebody presses play. A jump in the playhead survives the hop: the flag is an edge delivered once, and a relay publishing thirty times a second against a DAW’s ninety-odd blocks accumulates it rather than sampling it.
• The status bar and a tablet’s link bar both show the host’s transport: the position in the most precise unit the host gave — timecode, else bar and beat, else its own clock — with the tempo and time signature where there is room for them, and brighter while the transport is rolling than while it is parked. The app had been decoding all of it and showing none of it. A value the host did not supply is not drawn at all, rather than printed as a plausible zero.
• The app accepts plugin connections. PluginLink was written, tested and never constructed, so port 47822 was never bound: a VST3 or AU inserted in a DAW retried against nothing forever while the README said the desktop app meters what the DAW is playing. Inserting a plugin now puts it on the canvas — the act of inserting it is the act of choosing it — and removing it hands the canvas back to the local source. A port that cannot be bound is reported in the window rather than being silent, because the usual cause is a second copy of Open Audio Analyzer already running.
• oaa --target reads your own delivery targets, not only the six built-in ones. The app has always merged calibrations/*.json over the built-ins by id; the CLI knew nothing about them, so a corrected atsc-a85.json changed the verdict in the window and left the exit code — the one a release pipeline believes — judging against ours. oaa --list-targets shows them, and --config-dir points at a directory other than the default.
• The VST3 and the Audio Unit are published with each release, as one archive per platform holding the plugin bundles. They are not bundled inside the desktop installers yet.
• The plugin is compiled on Linux, macOS and Windows as part of a release, and on demand. Nothing built it before: the only plugin check in CI compared two text files and never invoked CMake, so a JUCE dependency fetched by tag, a C++ wire producer that has to agree with the Dart one byte for byte, and a version that moves every release were all held together by whoever last built it by hand. It is not built on every push, because three parallel JUCE builds cost more than a push asks for.

⚡ Changed

• The application is called Open Audio Analyzer everywhere it names itself. The window title, the macOS menu bar, the Windows version resource and the Android launcher label all said oaa, which is the repository’s short name and not the product’s. The executable moves with them: Open Audio Analyzer.app on macOS, OpenAudioAnalyzer.exe on Windows and open-audio-analyzer on Linux, where a space is not available — the Flutter-generated CMake makes the executable name a CMake target name, and CMake rejects one containing a space. The oaa CLI keeps its name; it is a command, and a command with spaces in it is not one. Bundle identifiers are unchanged, so no configuration moves and no host loses track of the plugin.
• The plugin’s bundle identifier is dev.openaudioanalyzer.oaa.plugin. It was io.github.jonasgrunau.bel: the rename to Open Audio Analyzer moved every other identifier and missed this one, because nothing built the plugin to notice. A host caches a plugin by that string, so it moves before the first published build rather than after.

🐛 Fixed

• A relocate is reported once rather than twice. The plugin marks the single audio block on which the playhead jumps, and that flag was carried both in the accumulator that exists to deliver it exactly once and in the transport payload, which is sampled — so a machine loaded enough for two frames to leave inside one audio block delivered one relocate as two, and a three-lap loop reported four. docs/WIRE.md lets a consumer count relocations by counting flagged frames, so the count was wrong; no reading changes, because nothing yet acts on the flag. Held by a new deterministic test rather than by a loaded machine.
• The “audio was lost” notice counts the frames the metered source discarded. It read the local engine’s counter while the flag that raises it comes from whatever is on the canvas, so a plugin that overran produced “Audio was lost — 0 frames were discarded”: a warning that contradicts itself, about a real loss of audio, carrying the number somebody would put in a bug report.
• The remote display no longer reads a destroyed engine. Changing the audio source or device while publishing to a tablet left the publish timer holding the engine it was built with, acquiring through a freed handle thirty times a second and sending 15 kB of returned heap to the tablet as a measurement. The service now follows the engine, and lives beside it rather than inside the status-bar button — which the status bar drops below 620 px of window width, so narrowing the window silently tore down an active session.
• A disposed engine reports itself unavailable instead of reading freed memory. Every scalar reading returns NaN, false or zero and refresh returns false, so a holder that keeps one a frame too long draws em dashes rather than plausible numbers. The array views cannot be guarded and are documented as invalid the moment dispose returns.
• Cancelling a file analysis no longer leaves the previous one running. The native cancel flag was freed while the worker isolate was still reading it, so the next analysis reallocated those four bytes as zero and the old worker read “not cancelled” and went on decoding its whole file — competing for the frame budget the isolate exists to protect. The flag is released once the isolate has actually exited.
• Resizing a module that a stored layout had left smaller than its own minimum, against the right or bottom edge, no longer throws. Rects are now pinned to the canvas and to the module’s minimum as they are read, whatever wrote them.
• The remote display’s advertised name can be cleared, not only replaced. Emptying the field restored the previous name, so “use this machine’s name” was unreachable once a name had been set.
• A file analysis that cannot start no longer leaks its open decoder.
• A preset named CON, AUX, NUL, PRN, COM1–COM9 or LPT1–LPT9 can be saved on Windows, where those are reserved with any extension.
• Stopping a pushed engine clears its running flag. It never started a thread, so oaa_engine_stop returned early and the snapshot reported a stopped engine as running for the rest of its life.
• A capture device’s id is no longer truncated to an odd number of hex digits with its terminator landing by luck. Trailing zero bytes are dropped before encoding, which keeps every id a real backend produces well inside the field.
• The plugin drops a wrong-length frame rather than sending it. The check was an assert, and the plugin is built Release everywhere including CI, so NDEBUG removed it from the only build that exercises the C++ producer.
• The plugin no longer tells the app the playhead relocated while the transport is parked. A stopped DAW still runs its graph and reports the position it sits at, unchanged, every block; the plugin compared that against “one block further on” and raised its discontinuity flag on every published frame for as long as the transport was stopped — measured at 140 frames out of 140. It is now only evaluated while the transport is rolling. Nothing in the application consumes the flag yet, so no reading changes today; the Elapsed and Timecode LUFS modes are what would have been affected.
• The plugin’s name arrives at the app as text rather than as mojibake. The HELLO frame’s producer name was built with juce::String’s const char* constructor, which reads its argument one byte to one codepoint, so the em dash in “Open Audio Analyzer plugin — “ was mangled on the way in and re-encoded on the way out: the app’s title bar read Open Audio Analyzer plugin â<80><94>. docs/WIRE.md specifies that field as UTF-8, which makes it a protocol defect rather than a typographical one. JUCE asserts on this and the assert is compiled out of the Release build, which is why nothing caught it.
• A relocate now reaches the app instead of usually being missed. The flag marks the single audio block on which the playhead jumped, and the streaming thread samples the transport once per published frame — every second block at a 512-frame buffer, one in sixteen at 64 — so it was set on one publish and read from another: three loop laps in a row delivered it zero times out of 186 frames. Edge flags now accumulate outside the seqlock and are delivered once each, which makes the count independent of buffer size. Verified at 64, 128 and 512 frames.

🚧 Internal

• The plugin’s framework-free C++ tests run on every push. plugin/’s JUCE fetch is conditional now, so -DOAA_BUILD_PLUGIN=OFF configures the directory in under a second and builds liboaa, the wire fixture and the transport box test in three — where the full job takes about ten minutes and, being gated to releases and manual runs, had been the only place any of it ran. It closes a real hole as well as a slow one: the wire golden is only worth having from both ends, and only the decoding half had been checked between releases.
• The fake DAW no longer invents relocates on a slow machine. An offline run handed the transport a read-ahead thread, and when that thread falls behind, JUCE’s buffering source returns silence while the reported playhead stops advancing — a host claiming to play with a position that sits still, which is a discontinuity by any definition, and the plugin flagged it. The plugin was right; the instrument was wrong. Offline runs read the file synchronously now, which is what makes their timeline independent of the scheduler; the device path keeps its buffer, where a stall is a click rather than a wrong number.
• resolveConfigRoot, ConfigDir, ConfigFile and slugify moved from the app into oaa_core, which is what lets the CLI read the same delivery targets the app writes. They are pure functions, so the package keeps its “no I/O” rule.
• A fake DAW, in plugin/host/. It plays an audio file through the VST3 or the Audio Unit and hands it a transport — tempo, time signature, timecode frame rate, loop points, the record flag, and the playhead itself, which can be switched off. None of the plugin’s playhead handling had ever been run before: the only host that could reach it was a real DAW driven by a person. It is built by the same CMake run as the plugin and shipped nowhere.
• The plugin is driven end to end by a test. plugin/host/ also runs headless — no window, no sound card — and packages/oaa_wire/test/plugin_e2e_test.dart spawns it, listens on the port the app listens on, and decodes what arrives. It is the only coverage of prepareToPlay, the FIFO, the playhead, the engine, the streaming thread and the socket at once; the byte-for-byte golden beside it is produced by a fixture that links no JUCE. It generates its own audio, so nothing in CI downloads anything, and it skips rather than fails without a built plugin.
• A DAW’s meters are held against what a tablet shows, in one test. test/plugin_to_display_e2e_test.dart runs the same fake DAW through the application’s own plugin ingest and display host, attaches a display client — which is what a tablet runs — and compares twenty-nine readings field by field, plus the playhead: the tempo, the meter, the timecode and the bar the host was told to be at. What a display receives is a re-encode of a snapshot the app decoded off the plugin’s socket, so a field dropped in the middle left both halves’ suites green and the tablet showing a dash. It skips without a built plugin, and CI runs it on the Linux leg of the plugin job.
• One thing the fake DAW found is written down rather than patched, under Known gaps in README.md: the plugin’s “host supplies no transport” branch cannot be reached through VST3 at all, because the format has no way to say it. That is a property of VST3 rather than a defect, and the branch is reached by the Standalone build. The other finding recorded that way on the first run — that the discontinuity flag usually did not survive the trip to the app — was fixed inside this release instead, and is under Fixed above; it moved a value docs/WIRE.md describes, which is why it was a decision before it was a fix.
• tool/fetch_test_audio.dart downloads the Creative Commons music the application is looked at with — a tone produces a spectrogram that is one bright line and a stereo cloud that is a dot, both correct and neither informative. Two CC BY 3.0 post-rock tracks from Wikimedia Commons, chosen by measuring four candidates with oaa rather than by reading titles: the default is a loud master with a real 10.3 LU range, a true peak above its sample peak, and a stereo field that moves. It resumes a partial download, verifies the length and signature, writes the attribution the licence asks for beside the audio, and is run by hand. No test depends on it.
• One workflow instead of three. ci.yml runs the tests, the documentation site, the installers and the release as jobs gated by event, so a push produces one run rather than two and a tag no longer produces a third that names neither. The reason it was split — that packaging must not slow the signal everybody waits on — is kept by not running those jobs on a push, which is a condition rather than a file. Two things the split had made impossible: a release can now depend on the test jobs, so a tag cannot publish from a red commit, and workflow_dispatch builds every installer without publishing anything.

0.2.0 — 2026-08-19

📐 Measurement

• The VU meter reads differently, and lower on most material. It was a one-pole smoother over mean square — an RMS meter with a 300 ms time constant. It is now what a VU movement actually is: average-responding and RMS-calibrated, through a second-order mechanism. A steady sine still reads its own RMS exactly, so a calibration tone is unchanged; anything peakier now reads lower, by 9 dB on a signal with a 10% duty cycle and typically 1 to 4 dB on dense modern masters. If you have been matching levels by VU against Open Audio Analyzer’s previous readings, re-check them. The needle also overshoots by about 1.2% on a transient, which is inside the tolerance the standard allows and is most of why a VU feels like a VU.

• The spectrum is now measured. 512 log-spaced bands from 20 Hz to 20 kHz, from a 4096-point Hann window per channel at a 1024-sample hop, zero-padded to a 16384-point transform. A band wide enough to contain bins takes the loudest of them rather than their average, so that a narrow resonance survives the mapping; a band too narrow to contain one — everything below about 216 Hz at 48 kHz — reads the transform between its two nearest bins. Levels are window-compensated: a full-scale sine on a bin centre reads 0.0 dBFS, verified on every push, and one falling between two bin centres reads within 0.3 dB of its own level rather than up to 1.4 dB low. Frequency resolution is that of the 4096-point window and the padding does not change it: two tones closer than 11.7 Hz still merge. What changes is that the bottom three octaves are drawn as the curve the transform measured instead of as a staircase of up to twenty-five identical bands.

• Per-band stereo position and the raw stereo sample stream are now published, which is what the stereo cloud and the phase scope draw.

• The short-term loudness distribution is now published, together with the 10th and 95th percentiles LRA is the difference of and the relative gate they were taken above — the same population the LRA number is computed from, so a distribution drawn from it cannot disagree with the number beside it.

• LRA itself is unchanged. It is now computed through the published percentiles rather than beside them, which is a refactor, not a new number.

• Loudness is now measured. LUFS-M, LUFS-S, LUFS-I and LRA previously read as a dash and now report real values, verified against the EBU Tech 3341 cases within the standard’s ±0.1 LU on every push, on all three desktop platforms. K-weighting follows ITU-R BS.1770-4 with coefficients designed at the stream’s own sample rate, so 44.1, 88.2, 96 and 192 kHz are correct rather than approximately correct.

• True peak is now measured, with the 4× polyphase oversampler from BS.1770-4 Annex 2. It reads higher than sample peak — by up to about 3 dB on dense, limited material — because that is what the signal actually reaches between samples. A master that previously passed a −1 dBTP ceiling on sample peak alone may now fail it. Re-measure before delivery.

• DR-S, DR-I, PLR and PSR are now defined, being differences of the above. See docs/METRICS.md for the formulas; none of them is Decibel’s proprietary TrueDyn and none pretends to be.

• LFE is excluded from loudness and surround channels are weighted +1.5 dB, per BS.1770-4. Channel layout is inferred from the channel count, and the four-channel case is read as quad (L R Ls Rs) rather than L R C LFE — see METRICS.md, and expect this to be replaced by real layout metadata when a device or file source can supply it.

• A device’s own sample rate and channel count are adopted, not converted to. Open Audio Analyzer measures the stream the hardware produced; resampling in front of the measurement would move inter-sample peaks and shift the K-weighted energy, and the resulting numbers would still look plausible.

• An interface wider than 7.1 is refused rather than measured eight channels at a time and reported as programme loudness.

• An unknown device id fails instead of falling back to the default. A preset naming an interface that is not plugged in would otherwise silently meter the laptop microphone.

• Files can now be measured, and they read exactly as the live meters do. Analysing a file decodes it and pushes the blocks through the same oaa_analyse a capture device drives — there is no second DSP path — so the numbers are identical rather than merely close. A test asserts that equality on the same samples analysed both ways, to the bit. A file is measured at its own sample rate and channel count; nothing resamples or remixes, because a converter in front of a measurement changes the measurement.

• A file report states maxima, not final values. Momentary and short-term loudness, correlation and per-channel peak describe an instant, so reading them once at the end would report the fade-out and call it the programme. They are watched across the whole file instead. Integrated loudness, LRA and the “max since reset” peaks are integrating quantities and are read at the end, which is correct for them.

• Sample values are not clamped on the way out of the decoder. A float WAV may legitimately hold values beyond ±1.0, and those are precisely the overshoots true-peak metering exists to find.

• The Spectrum Analyzer draws an average of the bands rather than the last transform, and it now says which. The engine publishes about 47 transforms a second and the module drew every one untouched, which flickers hard enough that the shape of a balance is difficult to read. A new Response setting in the module’s menu chooses Fast — no averaging, exactly what it did before — Normal at 120 ms, or Slow at 500 ms; Normal is the default, so an existing analyser reads calmer than it did and a band’s drawn level now lags a change by about that much. A short peak reads lower on Normal than it did on the frame it happened, by as much as the difference between the peak and what surrounds it. Nothing measured changed: the peak-hold line above the curve is never averaged at any setting, reports and the wire protocol carry the bands as measured, and the spectrogram and stereo cloud draw them as published.

✨ Added

• A remote display. Turn on publishing in the desktop’s status bar and a tablet on the same network shows the same meters — the same modules, the same layout, the same skin and the same delivery target, rendered by the same painters from measurements sent over the network rather than reimplemented. Hosts are found by name over mDNS (_oaa._tcp), and an address can always be typed instead, because multicast is the first thing a guest network blocks.

• A remote display says when it has stopped being current. Two seconds without a measurement and every reading becomes a dash and the link is marked stale, rather than leaving the last picture on screen. A frozen meter is indistinguishable from a quiet passage, so a display left running after its host slept would otherwise show a confident, detailed reading of a signal that had stopped existing.

• The display is watch-only, and off until switched on. It cannot reset, retarget or reconfigure the machine it is watching, and the port is closed until a human opens it. There is no password on the connection; anyone who can reach the port can read the measurements and the layout, which is why it is offered rather than assumed.

• A headless VST3 and Audio Unit plugin. Insert Open Audio Analyzer on any track, bus or master and the desktop app meters what the DAW is playing, through the same engine and the same painters as a live input — so a plugin reading and a device reading of the same audio cannot disagree. The plugin draws no meters itself; it measures and streams, and a small status panel says whether it is connected. Built for macOS, Windows and Linux, plus a standalone target for testing the link without opening a host.

• The DAW’s transport reaches the app: play and record state, playhead in seconds, samples and quarter-notes, tempo, time signature, loop points and SMPTE timecode with its frame rate. Every field carries a “the host supplied this” flag, because hosts differ enormously in what they report and a missing tempo arriving as zero is indistinguishable from a real one — an absent value renders as an em dash rather than a plausible number. The Elapsed and Timecode LUFS modes are not built yet; this is the measurement they will be counted from, and no module offers them today.

• The plugin reports when the playhead jumps — a relocate, a loop, a scrub. Anything integrating across that boundary is averaging two passes of the same music into one number and nothing about the result looks wrong, so it is stated rather than inferred. Acting on it — restarting an integration when the transport moves — needs an app-to-plugin control frame, and so wire protocol 2.

• The app listens for plugins on port 47822, loopback only. Several inserts may be connected at once; the most recently connected is the one shown, on the grounds that inserting a plugin is the act of selecting it.

• All twelve modules. The eleven that said NOT BUILT YET now measure something: a LUFS Meter (momentary and short-term as bars, integrated as a rule they pass through, the target as a band); a Digital Meter (per channel to 7.1, RMS as the column and peak as a floating tick, so the gap between them is the crest factor); a Super Meter (the three integrations on concentric arcs); a VU Meter (0 VU at the calibration’s reference level, not at digital full scale); an Alert Meter (one metric with its worst reading latched until reset); a Validator (three delivery checks and a verdict); a Histogram (short-term loudness over time, with the momentary window banded above it and everything past the delivery target in the over colour); a Loudness Distribution (how often the programme sat at each loudness, with the two percentiles LRA is the distance between, drawn from the same blocks the number is computed from); a Spectrum Analyzer; a Spectrogram; a Phase Scope; and a Stereo Cloud (per-band stereo position, which answers which part of a mix folds badly rather than only that it does).

• Open Audio Analyzer opens on a working meter bridge, with the frequency displays on a second tab, instead of six readings on an empty grid.

• The canvas is arrangeable. A 24-column by 16-row grid: drag a module by its title bar to move it, drag the corner grip to resize, alt-drag to duplicate, right-click or double-click empty space to add one, right-click a module for its options. Modules may not overlap and an illegal drop is refused rather than nudged elsewhere, with the target cells shown live while the pointer is down.

• Tabs, with rename, duplicate and delete, switchable with the number keys.

• Undo and redo, over every layout edit, from the keyboard or the tab strip.

• A Number Box shows any of the sixteen measurements, chosen per module from its menu.

• Inter and JetBrains Mono are bundled instead of requested from the system, so digit width and tracking are identical on macOS, Windows and Linux. Both are SIL OFL 1.1 and their licences ship alongside them.

• Capture from real audio devices. Inputs are enumerated and selectable from the source menu in the status bar. On Windows, WASAPI loopback meters system output with no setup; on macOS and Linux a virtual loopback device (BlackHole, a PipeWire monitor) appears in the same list — see the README.

• OaaSource.push and oaa_engine_push(): audio supplied synchronously by the caller, with no thread and no clock. It makes the engine a pure function of the samples it was given, which is what the conformance suite needs and what file analysis will be built on.

• Lost audio is reported rather than hidden. If analysis falls behind, the capture callback drops frames and the count is published; the app shows a warning saying the integrated reading can no longer be trusted. Integrated loudness averages every block since the reset, so dropped audio does not make it stale — it makes it an average of a different programme than the one that played.

• Offline file analysis. Drop a file on the analysis panel, or pick one, and it is measured end to end: WAV, AIFF, RF64, Wave64, FLAC and MP3. The run happens on a worker isolate so the live meters keep their frame budget, it reports progress, and it can be cancelled — cleanly, releasing the engine and the open file rather than leaking them.

• A report panel, showing the source, every programme-wide measurement, a short-term loudness graph with the integrated level marked, and the delivery verdict against the selected target.

• Reports export as text, JSON and CSV. Text is the human summary; JSON carries every measurement, the target and the verdict under stable field names; CSV is the loudness timeline, one row per point, for a spreadsheet or a plot. An unmeasured value is an em dash, a null and an empty cell respectively — never a zero, which is a legitimate reading for correlation and several dB quantities and so cannot double as “no data”.

• A oaa command-line analyser, so a loudness check can be a step in a release pipeline instead of something somebody remembers to do. It runs the same engine and the same decoder as the app. oaa --target streaming-14 master.wav exits 2 when the file misses its delivery spec, 1 on a file it cannot read and 0 when all is well, which is what lets a build fail on a master that is 2 LU too loud.

• Open Audio Analyzer remembers what you set up. The frame rate, the delivery target, the skin, the signal source and the arrangement on the canvas all survive quitting. The window reopens on the layout it was closed on, listening to the device it was listening to.

• Presets. Save the arrangement under a name, open it again later, delete it. One JSON file per preset in a documented directory, so a preset can be sent to somebody, dropped in from a forum post or kept in version control — and one corrupt file costs one preset rather than the library. A preset optionally carries the delivery target and skin it was saved with; leaving either out means “follow whatever is selected”, which is what makes a layout reusable across jobs.

• A delivery-target editor. Any spec Open Audio Analyzer does not ship — a label’s house standard, a game platform’s submission requirement — is now twenty seconds of typing rather than a feature request. User targets appear beside the built-ins everywhere, and a user file carrying a built-in’s id replaces that built-in, including in presets that already name it. Deleting the file brings the original back.

• Skins. The palette is thirteen named roles in a JSON file. A skin may set as few as one of them and inherit the rest, so changing the accent colour is a three-line file. Ships with Precision Instrument and Daylight, a light palette for a room with a window in it. “Duplicate for editing” writes the active palette out in full as a starting point, and “Reload from disk” picks up an edit without a restart.

• A settings panel, reachable from the status bar: signal and capture device, refresh rate and delivery target, skins, and whether the last layout is restored at launch. It also names the directory everything is kept in.

• The remote display’s name, port and frame rate are remembered. Whether it is publishing is not, deliberately: configuration is worth remembering, and the decision to open a port with no password on it is worth asking for every session — a laptop carried somewhere else must not start advertising itself because somebody enabled it once at home.

• The macOS build is no longer sandboxed. It was, which put your settings, presets, skins and delivery targets inside ~/Library/Containers/dev.openaudioanalyzer.oaa/Data/… instead of ~/Library/Application Support/Open Audio Analyzer, and stopped OAA_CONFIG_DIR from pointing anywhere outside that container. Configuration you cannot find is configuration you cannot edit, mail to somebody or keep in version control, which is most of the point of it being files. Open Audio Analyzer gives up Mac App Store eligibility, which was never planned; notarising the dmg does not need the sandbox. If you ran an earlier build, your existing configuration is in the container path above — move it across, or it will look as though Open Audio Analyzer forgot everything.

• The settings panel prints the configuration directory as selectable text rather than a path you would have to retype.

• The capture device is reopened by name when its id no longer matches. Device ids are not stable across reboots on any of the three platforms, so an id-only lookup silently drops you back to the test tone after a restart with no explanation.

• Keyboard shortcuts, and a sheet that lists them. Press ? or F1, or the ? in the status bar. Arrow keys nudge the selected module a cell and Shift+arrows resize it; Ctrl/Cmd with N, D, Z, T, R, O, P and , add a module, duplicate, undo, open a tab, restart the measurement, analyse a file, open presets and open settings. Open Audio Analyzer draws its own chrome and so has no menu bar to read a chord off, which is why the sheet exists.

• --config-dir names where Open Audio Analyzer keeps settings, presets, delivery targets and skins, and beats the OAA_CONFIG_DIR environment variable. On macOS it is the only one of the two that works on an installed .app: passing an environment variable means launching the binary inside the bundle, which changes how the system attributes the microphone request, so the variable and device capture could not be used in the same run.

• --open-panel=<name> opens one panel once the window is up, for settings, presets, calibration, report or shortcuts. Debug builds only; a release build says so rather than ignoring it.

• Installers for all four desktop targets — dmg, msix, AppImage and flatpak — plus the oaa analyser as a standalone binary, published on every tag.

• A documentation site, built from the Markdown in this repository and published from main. The keyboard page is generated from the same table the application binds, and a test fails if it has drifted.

• An application icon, at every size the four installers ask for.

• The icon now covers iOS and Android too. Both platforms were still shipping Flutter’s default logo — the blue chevron on white — so the app installed on a phone or tablet under somebody else’s mark. iOS gets the full layered icon described below; Android gets an adaptive icon, so the launcher masks it to whatever shape it uses and Android 13’s themed home screen has a monochrome layer to tint instead of shrinking the icon inside a grey circle. There is a Play Store icon in packaging/android/ for the console to be given by hand.

• The macOS and iOS icon is layered, so the system lights it. Both platforms now get an AppIcon.icon document — the graphite ground and the bars as separate layers — instead of a folder of pre-composited PNGs. macOS 26 and iOS 26 render it with their own specular highlight and shadow, and derive the dark and tinted appearances from it; on a themed or dark home screen the icon now follows instead of staying light. Older systems are unaffected: the same document still produces a classic .icns back to macOS 10.15 and flat icons back to iOS 13.

⚡ Changed

• The icon’s bars no longer climb in order. They were 0.34, 0.55, 0.74, 1.00 — which is the cellular signal glyph, drawn that way in the status bar of every phone the icon was about to appear on, and the shape is what the eye reads rather than the colour. They are now 0.62, 1.00, 0.44, 0.80: up, peak, valley, up, which is a meter. The bars also have slightly rounded corners, the tile’s ground is a diagonal gradient from hairline to background instead of flat graphite, and the hairline border is gone — it was a one-pixel detail that iOS masked off, Android cropped, and 16 px could not draw. Every platform’s artwork is regenerated from the same change.

• The application is now called Open Audio Analyzer. It was Bel. Nothing it measures changed — every reading is identical to the previous build — but the name it installs under, the directory it keeps your configuration in, the command-line binary and the protocol the tablet and the plugin speak all moved with it. The four below are the ones that can cost you something.

• Your settings, presets, delivery targets and skins are not carried across. Configuration now lives in ~/Library/Application Support/Open Audio Analyzer on macOS, in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/oaa or ~/.config/oaa on Linux, and in the matching path on Windows. The old directory is left untouched and is never read; copy its contents over before the first launch to keep what you had.

• This installs beside the previous version rather than over it. The application identifier is now dev.openaudioanalyzer.oaa, so every installer and package manager treats this as a new application. Remove the old one by hand if you do not want both.

• A tablet or a plugin from an earlier release will not connect. The wire protocol is at version 2: the frame magic spells the new name, and a host advertises _oaa._tcp rather than _bel._tcp. A mismatched peer is refused at the handshake rather than drawing wrong numbers, which is the failure that matters — but both ends have to be updated together.

• The command-line analyser is oaa, not bel. Any script or CI step that calls it needs the new name; its arguments and its exit codes are unchanged.

• The status bar wordmark reads OAA, and the gap between it and the source picker is one step tighter. OAA sets about 3.4 px wider than the mark it replaced, which on its own was enough to run that row past its edge at 1000 px with the longest delivery-target name.

• Every number is set in Google Sans Code instead of JetBrains Mono. The advance is 0.6 em in both faces, so nothing moves and no readout changes width; the digits are a little smaller on the body and rounder in the bowls. One character the old face carried is missing from the new one — ∞, which a reading only shows if it is not finite, and nothing the engine produces is — so it now falls back to Inter, which Open Audio Analyzer already bundles, rather than to whatever the host offers. Both faces remain SIL OFL 1.1 and their licences still ship with every package.

• Undo and redo in the tab strip carry a mirrored arrow beside the word. The two words differ by one letter in the middle, and a mirrored pair says which way it goes before either has been read — but the arrow alone left the row’s two most-used controls unnamed, so it now punctuates UNDO and REDO the way the plus punctuates + MODULE. The arrows are drawn, like every other mark in Open Audio Analyzer, so they are the same on every platform and cost no dependency. The keyboard shortcuts are unchanged.

• The delivery target in the status bar is built like the buttons beside it, one step quieter. Same height and the same capitals, because it opens a menu on a click exactly as the four buttons to its right do and a control that can be pressed should look like one. Its border stays the fainter of the two hairlines, which is what still tells the thing that reports a setting from the four that do something. The target’s own name is unchanged everywhere else: the menu, the settings panel and every report print it as it was typed.

• A remote display’s modules have no menu button. The title bars drew one and it did nothing, because there is nothing on that screen a viewer is allowed to change. It is gone rather than disabled.

• The stereo cloud’s centre line is drawn over the frequency axis. The three horizontal guides crossed in front of it, which broke the one line the module exists to mark into what looked like a dashed one.

• A rule separates the tab strip’s two kinds of action. UNDO and REDO step back and forward through what has been done; + MODULE does something new. They were four controls of the same size, colour and weight in one run.

• A remote display’s link bar has room to breathe, and its tabs are beside the host’s name. The bar is 48 px rather than 40, so the tab picker and Disconnect are not pressed against the rule under them, and the tabs now follow the name of the machine being watched instead of sitting in the far corner — which on a tablet is the most awkward place on the screen for the control the viewer touches most. Disconnect stays on the right, alone, where it is not hit by accident.

• Both pluses in the tab strip are larger. At the size the words use they read as specks rather than as controls. The one beside the tabs is the larger of the two, because it is the only symbol in the strip carrying an action with no word to help it; the one in + MODULE is set between the two, visible without competing with the word it belongs to.

• The keyboard sheet is one screen again. Seventeen shortcuts in a single narrow column were taller than the panel, so the sheet scrolled and cut the line explaining that Ctrl and Cmd are interchangeable in half. It is now two columns on a wider panel — Canvas and Measurement on the left, Tabs and Configuration on the right — with the rows further apart and the whole list on screen at once, down to the smallest window Open Audio Analyzer supports. Below that it stacks back into one column rather than clipping. Measurement now comes before Tabs on the documentation site’s keyboard page as well, which is the same ordering.

• The remote panels are marked rather than only worded. Sending and receiving were two rows of the same shape whose only difference was the sentence in them; each now carries a mark — a machine broadcasting, a screen on a stand — and a chevron on the rows that open a panel rather than choose in place. Every host a search finds wears the broadcast mark too, and it brightens under the pointer instead of sitting in the same grey as its address. A note that is a warning — the link has no password, this device cannot search the network, publishing failed — now has a warning mark in the margin beside it, so it is a different kind of line rather than a differently coloured one. The marks are drawn rather than typeset, so none of them can arrive as a tofu box on a platform whose fonts differ. Sending and receiving also sit further apart than the rows of a list do, since they are two directions to choose between rather than entries to pick from.

• A machine’s name, its port and the Apply that commits them are one line. They were three stacked rows, so a two-field form read as three separate settings and the button that finishes it sat a row below either field. They now share a line, which the panel has room for.

• A segmented control sets its choices in capitals, like every button beside it. Source, refresh rate, the remote update rate and a display’s tab picker were the only controls in the interface labelled in sentence case, which read as a line of prose in a box rather than as something to press. What a menu or a field holds — a device, a delivery target, a name somebody typed — is unchanged, because that is a value rather than the control’s own word.

• The Histogram’s loudness line is always on screen. It used to be drawn only over the columns the programme had reached, so an empty module — before the first audio, and for as long as you looked at it after a reset — had nothing in it at all, and a part-filled one had a line over part of its width. The line now rests on the floor of the scale and runs the full width of the plot, rising where the programme starts. Resting is not a reading: the floor is the bottom of the scale, nothing is filled beneath it, and it is drawn where measured silence would put it.

• Nothing is a double click any more. Renaming a tab, adding a module by clicking empty canvas, and zooming the window from the status bar were all double clicks; the first two are now a long press — which also gives a tablet a tab’s rename, duplicate and delete for the first time — and the window is zoomed with the green window button, as it always could be. See 🐛 Fixed for why a double click was worth removing.

• Moving a module dims the rest of the canvas, and the placement grid now has a border. The grid is ruled inside a rounded border that sits one gutter outside the modules, with the same corner radius they have, and for as long as the pointer is down every module except the one in hand is washed toward the canvas colour. A drop target among a dozen meters that are all still moving was something you had to hunt for; the cells, the module being carried and where it will land are now the only things at full contrast. Nothing is measured differently — the meters underneath keep updating throughout.

• The phase scope’s trail no longer smears. It was a picture faded and redrawn on every frame, so a moving dot was resampled once per frame and spread outwards; it is now the last forty frames of samples, each drawn at the brightness its age has earned. A dot fades where it was rather than blurring, and the decay is exact instead of compounding through the rounding of an 8-bit surface — the tail is fractionally longer for the same reason.

• The stereo cloud is accumulated as numbers rather than as a picture, in cells of two logical pixels, with each band’s dot spread across the four cells it falls between. The shape, the fade and the brightness are the same; a close look finds dots on a two-pixel grid where they were previously at arbitrary positions.

• A module’s readings now grow with the module. The bars, the arcs and the VU face have always been sized off the tile they are in; four modules sized their numbers off a constant instead, so the LUFS meter’s LUFS-I and LRA, the Super Meter’s centre readout, the Alert Meter’s value and the Validator’s measured column stayed the same size whether the module had a corner of a laptop screen or a quarter of a 27” one. The labels beside them — a scale’s ticks, a column heading, PASS and FAIL — deliberately do not scale; they are the same size in every module on the canvas.

• The smallest supported window is now 960x768, up from 720x480 (macOS; the other platforms set no minimum). The canvas is a fixed 24x16 cells at every window size, so at 480 px tall a two-row module had 12 px of body left after its title bar and margin — less than a digit. 768 is the height at which the smallest module in the default preset still has room for its number.

• A module too small to draw in now says so instead of showing an empty panel. The size a module needs is in pixels, not grid cells, so it was never something the cell minimums could enforce; each painter checked it privately and drew nothing when it failed. The thresholds are now declared on ModuleKind and the frame substitutes the “too small” placeholder, which is what it was always for.

• The status bar drops items in a stated order as the window narrows, one at a time and each at the width below which the rest stop fitting: first the sample-rate readout, then the OAA wordmark, then ANALYSE FILE, then REMOTE, then the ? button. All four buttons keep their keyboard shortcuts, which are listed in the ? sheet and in docs/site/keyboard.md. What never drops is the source, the elapsed clock, the delivery target, SETTINGS and RESET. There was one gate before this, it was 20 px too generous, and nothing had measured it.

• The settings panel has been reworked, and every other panel with it. Sections are now ruled off from each other with a hairline instead of by whitespace alone, so Signal, Meters, Appearance and Session read as four groups rather than one column of grey; a row’s explanation runs the full width of the panel underneath its control instead of wrapping in whatever space the control left over; and the loopback advice under Capture device is two lines rather than four. The same changes reach the preset browser, the delivery-target editor, the analysis report, the remote-display panel and the keyboard sheet, because all six are built from the same primitives.

• REMOTE now asks which end of the link this machine is. Pressing it opens a chooser — send these meters, or show another machine’s — and each answer opens its own panel. Publishing used to be the whole of what the button offered: turning this screen into a display was a footer button on the publishing dialog marked “Use as display”, which is the row a panel reserves for the ways out of it. The chooser also says whether this machine is already publishing and how many displays are attached, so that is answerable without opening anything further.

• The remote display’s connect screen is a panel like every other panel. It was the one screen in Open Audio Analyzer that had never been near the design system — an unstyled list, a stock text field with a rounded outline and Material text buttons, on the hardware the feature exists for. Discovered hosts are panel rows now, the typed address is an Open Audio Analyzer field with Connect in the footer, and it is the same panel the desktop opens rather than a second implementation of it. The strip across the top of a live display gets the status bar’s fill and hairline, with the tab picker and Disconnect as controls rather than as text. Disconnecting returns to the picker instead of to a dead screen.

• Every boxed control in a panel is the same height. Buttons, menus, segmented controls and text fields derived their heights independently and came out at 30, 32, 31.4 and 28.9 px, so no two standing side by side in a row ever quite lined up. They are all 32 px now.

• A menu looks like a menu. The capture-device and delivery-target pickers were bordered labels in caption grey — fainter than the buttons beside them, which reads as disabled — with nothing to say they opened anything. They now carry a caret, show their value in the same weight as the rest of the panel, highlight under the pointer, mark the current choice in the open menu, and can be reached and opened from the keyboard, which neither of them could before. The menu also no longer arrives with a Material drop shadow.

• The selected skin is visible as selected. Selection in a panel list was carried by a single step of grey on a 1 px border; it is now a raised fill as well.

• The unfilled part of a meter is now visible. meter_track sat at 1.10:1 against the panel behind it on the dark skin and 1.22:1 on the light one — close enough to the surface that a bar showed its own fill and nothing else, and the Super Meter’s three arcs could only be located by whichever one happened to be lit. Both shipped skins now hold it at roughly 1.6:1, and still about 2.5:1 below meter_fill so the reading stays the figure and the track stays the ground. A user skin that sets meter_track keeps its own value; a skin that inherits it gets the new one.

• Modules have room to breathe, and the same amount of it on every side. The inset between a module’s border and its meter went from 8 px to 12 px, and the title bar’s inset moved with it so the title still starts where the meter starts. Meters draw to the edges of what the frame hands them — a painter that adds a second inset of its own is a module that sits differently from the other eleven.

• A dB scale no longer reserves more room than it uses. The gutter beside a graticule was a flat 30 px whatever the labels said, so a meter with short labels sat visibly off-centre in its module — thirteen pixels of empty reserve on the scale side against nothing on the other. It is now measured from the labels themselves. Affects the LUFS meter, the digital meter, the spectrum analyser and the histogram.

• The VU dial is sized to the module rather than to a fixed sweep. The face opened 70° whatever shape the tile was, which in a wide tile drew the whole instrument across the middle half of the width and left the rest bare. The sweep now opens as far as the box allows, between 70° and 110°, and the dial is centred on what is actually drawn.

• The frame rate is no longer in the status bar. It was a second way to reach one setting, sitting in a row otherwise reserved for what changes while you work and what a reading has to be read against. It is chosen once for a machine; it lives in the settings panel and only there. The delivery target stays in the bar, because every PASS and FAIL on the canvas is a verdict against it.

• A panel that scrolls now says so. Settings is taller than the 760 px a panel is allowed and ended on a row the viewport happened to cut in half, with nothing to suggest there was more below it. A scrollbar appears when the content overflows and stays hidden when it does not.

• The REMOTE button now looks like the rest of the status bar. It was the one stock Material button in the row — borderless where its four neighbours are bordered, Material-sized rather than bar-sized, ink-rippled, and not reachable by keyboard. It now carries the same border, padding, type and focus ring as ANALYSE FILE, SETTINGS and RESET, and states what it is doing on hover. Publishing is shown by the label brightening rather than by the signal hue, which in this row means “in spec” and nothing else. The panel behind it is built from the same pieces as the other panels.

• The macOS window has no title bar of its own. The status bar now runs to the top edge of the window, and the close, minimise and zoom buttons sit inside it on the same row as the source and the elapsed clock. The strip of system grey above a bar of panel grey, and the window title printed in a font Open Audio Analyzer does not choose, are both gone. Dragging the status bar moves the window and double-clicking it zooms, as dragging and double-clicking the title bar did. Windows and Linux are unchanged.

• A light skin no longer runs under dark window buttons on macOS. The window follows the skin’s light flag, so Daylight gets light chrome and the two stop disagreeing about which way up the room is.

• The signal hue now means one thing on the canvas. Teal previously marked both “in spec” and “selected”, so a selected module was outlined in the same colour as a reading that had passed its target, a few pixels from the reading itself. Selection is now a brighter, heavier border; the active tab, the highlighted menu row, the resize grip, the listening indicator and the drop preview all moved to neutral values. Teal now appears on the canvas only when something is within its delivery target.

• The em dash that means “not measured” is drawn in a legible colour. It shared a value with scale ticks and disabled controls, at 2.81:1 against the panel against readings at 15:1 — the one mark in the interface that says a quantity was not measured was the hardest one to see.

• Selection, hover and focus borders are visible. hairline_strong was 1.47:1 against the panel — a role whose whole purpose is to be seen, set to a value that could not be, which is why callers reached past it for the accent. It is now roughly 3:1 in both shipped skins. A user skin that sets hairline_strong keeps its own value and is unaffected.

• RESET now states its scope on hover: it restarts the measurement, and leaves the layout, target and skin alone.

• The meters cap themselves at 30 fps when the system asks for reduced motion, and the settings panel says so rather than showing a rate nothing is running at. Open Audio Analyzer has no decorative animation to switch off — what moves is the measurement — so a lower redraw rate is the only honest reading of that preference. No reading is withheld.

• The main view is an arrangeable canvas instead of a fixed wall showing every metric at once. It opens on six readings — LUFS-M, LUFS-S, LUFS-I, LRA, TP Max and Peak Max — and the rest of the canvas is yours.

• A module’s default measurement now follows its kind rather than always being integrated loudness, so a freshly placed Alert Meter watches true peak — which is what an alert is for. A saved layout that omitted the key reads back differently for alert meters.

• The signal source is a persisted setting rather than something the status bar holds. Two controls can change it now — the bar and the settings panel — and both write to the same place, which is also what lets the next launch reopen it.

• The interface no longer has a single compile-time palette. Everything that draws takes its colours from the active skin.

• The delivery-target menu lists the user’s own targets alongside the built-in ones.

• The DAW plugin ships as VST3 and Audio Unit rather than the CLAP the plan named. CLAP’s SDK is the nicest of the three, but Ableton Live does not host CLAP, and a metering plugin that cannot be inserted in Live is one most people cannot use.

• Keyboard shortcuts work wherever focus is. They were installed inside the canvas and stopped working the moment focus left it — clicking the source picker was enough to silently disable undo. They now wrap the whole workspace.

• The tab strip’s + sits beside the last tab and scrolls with the tabs, rather than being carried to the far end of the strip.

🐛 Fixed

• A remote display recovers from a dropped link, instead of showing one frame of invented measurement and then never coming back. A connection that died partway through a measurement left the head of that frame in the display’s frame reader, which nothing cleared — so the retry reassembled the dead stream’s bytes onto the live one. That splice is exactly the right length to decode, so the meters drew a detailed, confident reading nobody took, lost sync on whatever followed, and dropped the link again, carrying the leftovers into every attempt after that. A tablet that lost a single frame to a Wi-Fi hiccup stopped recovering until the app was restarted — Disconnect and reattach did not clear it either. Nothing about how Open Audio Analyzer measures has changed and no past reading needs re-checking: the desktop and the CLI were never on this path.

• The status bar’s controls are one height. The delivery target read 25.4 px tall against 22 px for the four buttons beside it, because each shape derived its height from its own text style plus its own padding rather than being given one. The borders in the row now start and end on the same pixel.

• A warning mark sits in the middle of the note it marks. It was pinned to the top of the block, so beside the sending panel’s two lines of orange it looked as though it belonged to the first line rather than to the warning.

• A long capture session no longer dies with a bus error. The sub-block ring the loudness measurements are built from carried a write cursor beside it, and the store into the ring trusted that cursor. One was found holding a float bit pattern after 36 minutes of capture, which turned an ordinary 100 ms boundary into an 8-byte write 229 GB past the engine and killed the process. The row is now derived from the sub-block count where it is used, so the write lands inside the ring whatever the counter holds. Every reading is unchanged, bit for bit, and the EBU conformance vectors still pass. What put a float there has not been identified; this stops the engine turning it into a wild store.

• A capture device is released when the engine fails to start. If an allocation failed after the device had been started — sizing the analysis buffer, or the spectrum’s transforms — the engine was freed while the real-time callback was still writing into the ring inside it, handing that callback a dangling pointer into a block the allocator was about to reuse. Startup now tears the device down on every failing path.

• An iPad can now find hosts on the network. It never could: iOS and iPadOS refuse an app the multicast socket Open Audio Analyzer browses with unless it carries an entitlement Apple grants per developer on request, so every send was rejected and nothing was ever delivered — on the hardware the remote display exists for. The tablet now searches through the system’s own Bonjour responder, which needs no entitlement, and finds the same hosts by the same name. Typing an address still works and still always will.

• A host on a network that hands out a domain is visible again. Most routers give DHCP clients one, which makes the machine’s name studio-mac.fritz.box rather than studio-mac.local — and Open Audio Analyzer advertised that whole string where DNS-SD allows a single label, so the announcement came out as six labels instead of four. Open Audio Analyzer’s own browser read it anyway, so an Open Audio Analyzer desktop found an Open Audio Analyzer desktop and nothing looked wrong; every browser built on the system responder — an iPad, dns-sd, anything Apple — dropped the record, and the host answered every query on the wire while appearing to no one. The instance is now one label whatever the machine is called, and the name you read in the list is unchanged.

• Open Audio Analyzer no longer advertises an address record for the machine’s own name. The name a Mac answers to belongs to the system responder, which defends it: an address record it did not publish, for a name it owns, is a conflict, and the loser of a conflict renames itself. On a machine with a second network interface the two sets differ, so the loser would have been the user’s computer. Open Audio Analyzer publishes its own name for the service to point at.

• A search that cannot run says why. A device that could not search showed Looking for hosts on this network… indefinitely, which is exactly what a network with no hosts on it looks like. It now names the reason where there is one to name — a refused Local Network permission on macOS points at System Settings — and says plainly that it cannot search where there is not.

• A laptop in a dock is listed at an address that answers. A machine with a second network interface — an empty dock, a Thunderbolt bridge — announces every address it has, and the browser kept whichever arrived last. Half the time that was the interface’s self-assigned 169.254 address, which nothing on the network can reach, so the host appeared in the list and the connection timed out. A routable address is now preferred, and a host that moves replaces its old address rather than adding to it.

• A panel follows a change of skin while it is open. Choosing one in Settings → Appearance repainted the canvas, the window chrome and the panel’s own text fields and menus, but left the panel’s surface, hairlines, labels and the dimming over the canvas in the previous skin until the panel was closed and reopened — so the one place a skin is chosen was the one place it could not be seen, and the panel was drawn in two skins at once meanwhile.

• A two-finger trackpad gesture no longer drags things. Right-clicking a module’s title bar on a trackpad flashed the placement grid on screen, because a two-finger tap is how macOS sends that click and every drag in the application accepted a trackpad gesture as one: a two-finger scroll over a title bar moved the module, over the corner grip resized it, and over the status bar it started dragging the window. A drag now begins from a button press and from nothing else. Clicking and dragging on a trackpad is unaffected — that is a mouse as far as the system is concerned.

• The top of a meter’s scale is no longer cut in half. The 0 on the LUFS meter was drawn as its own bottom half, and the same line of code clipped the spectrum analyser’s top label and the first and last labels on the histogram’s frequency axis. An end label now sits fully inside the meter; its gridline has not moved.

• The M and S under the LUFS meter’s bars are drawn at all. They were centre-aligned in an unconstrained line box, which put each letter half a megapixel to the right of the meter — so the two bars had nothing naming them and the space for the names was still reserved beneath them.

• The LUFS meter’s two readings are no longer printed with their last digit missing. They were sized off the module’s height alone, so a tall narrow meter asked for digits wider than the column under the bar they belong to and the reading stopped drawing where it ran out of room: -17.6 was shown as -17., which reads as a different number rather than as a clipped one. Both now take the largest size that fits the column as well as the height, and are hidden — as they already were on a short module — when that size would be too small to read.

• The super meter’s ring names sit beside the arcs they name. M, S and I led their arcs by a fixed angle, which is a fixed fraction of each radius, so the outer name stood nearly twice as far from its arc as the inner one did from its and the three read as a diagonal drifting off the gauge. They are now the same distance from every arc.

• Buttons no longer take a third of a second to respond. Every control in the status bar on macOS, every tab, and clicking empty canvas to clear the selection fired 300 ms after the click that pressed them. Each sat under a gesture that also recognised a double click, and Flutter’s double-tap recogniser holds the gesture arena from the first tap until it times out — so the button’s own tap could not be resolved until the wait for a second click had expired. The double clicks are gone (see ⚡ Changed) and the controls answer on release.

• Open Audio Analyzer crashed after a few minutes with a spectrogram, phase scope or stereo cloud on the canvas, and grew without bound until it did. One report showed the application holding 266 GB before macOS stopped it. Those three modules accumulated their history into an image taken with toImageSync, which retains the display list that drew it for as long as the image lives — so every frame’s image pinned the frame before it, back to the first one, and disposing the handle released none of it. The application then died on the raster thread when that chain was finally dropped and its destructors recursed once per retained frame, 3,286 deep in the report that found this. All three now keep their history as data and redraw it, which costs memory proportional to the module’s size rather than to how long Open Audio Analyzer has been open.

• A spectrogram opened before any audio arrived began with a column of full scale, and the stereo cloud with a bright line down its centre. Both were reading the zeroed arrays of a source that has not published yet, which as dB is 0 dBFS on every band. A source that has measured nothing now draws nothing.

• The LUFS meter’s two readouts sat under the wrong things. They were laid out against the middle of the module, but the bars begin after the scale’s gutter — so LUFS-I printed under the scale numbers and LRA under the middle of the momentary bar. Both now line up with the bars they sit below. No reading changed; the two numbers are the same numbers, in the right column.

• Six Number Boxes rendered as empty panels on a small window. On anything under about 700 px tall a two-row Number Box had less body than a digit is tall, and the painter’s own size check meant it drew nothing rather than saying so. Every module now shows the “too small” placeholder instead, and the supported minimum window is large enough that the default preset never reaches it.

• The status bar ran 121 px past the edge of the window at the smallest size the window could be dragged to. In a debug build that is a striped overflow warning; in a release build the controls past the edge are simply not there.

• The signal source overflowed its own place in the bar whenever the name of the capture device came close to filling the room the bar had left for it — a striped warning across the source label in a debug build, and a name clipped without a mark in a release one. The name now shortens with an ellipsis to whatever the row can spare, as the delivery target beside it already did.

• The Stereo Cloud looked broken on a mono source. A built-in laptop microphone has one channel, per-band stereo position needs two, and the engine reports mono as dead centre — so every band plotted at the middle of the display and the module drew one bright vertical line and nothing else, which reads as a rendering fault rather than as a mono signal. It now says MONO SOURCE across the face and leaves the axis empty. No measurement changed; a stereo source draws exactly as before.

• Selecting a capture device did nothing. Only the source chosen at launch ever opened; every change made afterwards — from the status bar or from Settings, to a microphone, an interface, a loopback device, Silence or back to the test tone — was discarded. The choice was saved and reappeared as selected the next time you looked, so the meters looked like the failure: they went on showing the previous source, with its label, its channel count and its elapsed clock still running, exactly as though no input were reaching the machine. Each attempt also opened the device and held it with nothing reading it, which is why the system’s recording indicator came on while the meters stayed on the test tone. Relaunching with the device already selected was the only way through, and is no longer needed.

• Every panel’s four corners were missing their border. The surface is a rounded clip over a square border, so the clip removed the corner of the hairline along with everything else outside the arc: the border ran the flat edges and stopped dead at each tangent, leaving four bare arcs of panel fill fading into the barrier. The border now carries the same radius as the clip and runs continuously around the corner. Settings, the preset browser, the calibration editor, the report, the remote display panel and the shortcuts sheet are all built from that one surface, so all six are corrected — as is the startup notice, which had the same defect at a smaller radius.

• The elapsed clock sat two pixels high in the status bar. It is painted rather than built, and it was drawn from the top-left corner of a box taller than the line it holds, so every spare pixel fell below the digits and the clock rode above the optical centre of every label beside it. It now centres its line in its box, which is what a Text does with the space it is given.

• Everything in the tab strip’s action row sat a pixel below the tab names — most visibly the + that adds a tab, which stands directly beside the last one. A tab reserves the height of the active-tab rule whether or not it is the active tab, and the buttons reserved nothing, so the two rows of text were centred in boxes of different heights. The + was low for a second reason as well: a lone plus is drawn on the font’s math axis, below the middle of the band the words around it fill, and it is now raised onto their line.

• The LUFS meter’s two bars, and the digital meter’s channels, shared one background. The gap between bars was painted in the trough colour, so it only showed where one bar’s fill had risen past the other’s: two channels at the same level read as a single wide bar, and two at different levels as one bar with a step in it. Each bar now has its own trough and the gap shows the module behind it. The scale, the target band and the integrated rule still cross it — they belong to the meter, not to either bar.

• The VU meter’s face had four drawing defects. The needle was drawn from behind its own pivot with a tail longer than the cap meant to hide it, so a second short needle stuck out of the bottom pointing the other way. At rest it lay along the −20 mark and struck that label through — and every reading on the lower half of the face had the needle across it, because the labels were inside the sweep. The six scale numbers were centred on a common radius rather than cleared from the arc by a common gap, so they scattered, with 0 hanging below its own tick. And the dial sat high and left in the tile with the VU badge adrift in the empty corner. The needle now runs outwards only, the labels sit outside the arc where nothing can cross them, each one clears the arc by the same gap whatever its angle, and the badge sits under the pivot where the needle cannot reach. The ballistics and the scale are unchanged — the needle points at the same mark it did before.

• Four modules drew their contents in a corner instead of in the box. A Number Box put its reading against the left edge, which on an unavailable reading left a single em dash alone in the corner of a four-cell tile, looking like a rendering fault rather than “not measured yet”. An Alert Meter hung its block from the top edge of a module more than twice its height. The Super Meter centred itself as though it were a full circle when it opens 120° at the bottom, leaving a dead band a fifth of the module deep beneath it. The Validator stopped its rows at 34 px each and left the rest of the tile blank.

• A one-row Number Box drew a title bar and nothing else. A single grid row is about 55 px, and the title bar and the module’s inset account for all of it, so the reading had no room and the painter returned without drawing — blank, rather than the “too small” a module says when it cannot be read. The minimum is two rows now, and a stored layout holding a one-row box is clamped up rather than rejected.

• The delivery-target menu did not show which target was selected. Both arms of the ternary that picks the row colour returned the same value, so every entry was drawn identically and the active target was indistinguishable from the five it was listed with.

• The right-hand end of the status bar drifted away from the right edge. The elapsed clock, the calibration and the four buttons sat progressively further from the window’s right side the wider the window got, leaving a growing empty stretch of bar beside them. They are now flush with the edge at every width.

• The remote display panel could not be opened. Pressing REMOTE in the status bar threw “No OaaTheme in scope” and left the panel unbuilt, in release as well as debug — it was pushed with showDialog, so the Navigator built it above the palette the application provides. It is now pushed with showOaaPanel like the other five, and a test opens it through the button.

• Open Audio Analyzer could not be built for iPadOS at all. The engine was compiled as C on every platform, but miniaudio’s Core Audio backend is Objective-C on iOS — it configures an AVAudioSession, which has no C interface — so the build ended in several hundred errors inside Apple’s Foundation headers, none of which named a file in Open Audio Analyzer. The iOS build now compiles as Objective-C and links the frameworks miniaudio needs there. The tablet build is the remote display, and it now runs on an iPad.

• The iPad build would have been terminated by iOS the first time an input was chosen. NSMicrophoneUsageDescription was missing from the app’s Info.plist, which is not an error the app can catch — the system kills a process that touches the microphone without one.

• An iPad remembered nothing between launches and opened with “no configuration directory”. Open Audio Analyzer resolved its configuration from HOME, which iOS does not set — so every layout, skin and connection was lost when the app was closed. iPadOS now keeps its configuration in Library/Application Support/Open Audio Analyzer inside the app’s own container, which Open Audio Analyzer locates through the temporary directory rather than the environment. An Android tablet still persists nothing, and still says so at launch.

• A module’s resize grip was drawn outside the module. Both ticks ran to the corner of the module’s slot, which is past the frame’s rounded border — so they crossed the border and finished in the gutter between modules, and on a selected module they cut through the selection outline. They now sit inside the panel in both states; the area you can grab is unchanged.

• Selecting a module broke its own outline in two places. The rule under the title bar ran the full width of the frame and was painted after the border, so it printed the dim hairline colour over the bright selection border at each end. The rule now stops at the border’s inner edge.

• Nothing in a panel could be reached from the keyboard. Every control Open Audio Analyzer paints itself — buttons, toggles, segmented controls, list rows, icon targets — was a bare gesture detector, so none of them took focus, none responded to Enter or Space, none drew a focus ring, and none was visible to a screen reader. Settings, presets and the delivery-target editor were mouse-only with nothing on screen to say so. All of them are now focusable, keyboard operable, and announced.

• Opening the host picker a second time searched a browse that had already been shut down. A tablet’s search runs over one channel, and a channel keeps one subscription: opening a second picker while the first was still on screen — which happens for a frame every time one replaces another — ended the first one’s browse, and the first one’s teardown then ended the second’s. The panel left on screen said “Looking for hosts on this network…” over nothing that was running, found no host however long it was left, and logged “No active stream to cancel” when it was closed. The search is now shared: one browse for the application, handed to whoever is looking, and stopped when the last of them closes.

• Changing the signal source could replace every meter on the canvas with a red error box reading “A MeterClock was used after being disposed”. The old clock was torn down before the new one was installed, so any painter still mounted for that frame — which is all of them — tried to attach to a disposed notifier. Disposal now happens after the frame that replaces it.

• Tabs were clipped off the end of the strip while it was visibly half empty. The tab area and the gap before the action buttons were two flex children of equal weight, so the strip gave half its free width to the gap. Three tabs in an 800 px window were enough to lose one.

• Renaming a tab from its context menu opened a field that would not accept typing. The menu’s route restored focus to the canvas after the field had claimed it. Double-clicking a tab was never affected, which is what made this hard to see: the two ways in behaved differently.

• Every keyboard shortcut stopped working after a text field closed, until something was clicked. Focus fell back to the navigator’s scope, which sits above the bindings, and a key event travels up from the focused node — so there was nothing below it to reach.

• Closing the host picker on a tablet while it was still searching threw. Ending the Bonjour browse suspends on the channel, and the rest of the stop — which publishes an empty list of hosts — ran after the picker had already disposed the notifier it publishes to. It surfaced as “A ValueNotifier<List<DiscoveredHost>> was used after being disposed” in the log, most reliably on a hot restart. The search is now published as ended before anything is awaited, and teardown releases the browse without publishing at all.

• A display leaving mid-frame threw in the host it was leaving. Closing a socket that is still flushing a measurement is a StateError in Dart’s own I/O — “StreamSink is bound to a stream” — and it was raised inside the socket’s own close notification, where nothing could catch it. Every tablet that dropped off at the wrong moment logged what reads as a crash and left the connection it was there to give back.

• Changing the skin, the layout or the delivery target could disconnect a display. The new setting goes out the instant it changes, and a socket still flushing a measurement refuses to be written to — which the host could only read as “this display has gone”, and act on. It was likelier the slower the display was. A setting now waits for the frame in front of it and then goes, in order.

• Attaching to another machine flashed the host picker on the way in, and started a second search behind it. The link said it was connecting one turn after it began, and a display shows the picker until it does — so a screen that had already been told where to attach spent a frame drawing a panel asking where to attach, and a picker searches the network as soon as it is built.

• Closing the host picker while it was still opening its socket threw. Binding is real I/O, and the search could be shut down while it was in flight: what came back then was written to a notifier that had been disposed, and the socket it arrived with was never closed. On macOS the window is as long as the Local Network prompt is on screen.

• A panel row’s explanation no longer runs into the control above it. The caption sat two pixels under the row, and a row is as tall as whatever sits on its right — so under a bordered control it collided with the bottom edge rather than reading as a line of its own. The delivery target showed it worst: its note ended directly beneath the target menu and looked like part of it. It now clears the control, and still sits half as far from its own row as from the next one.

• The documentation site shows the current mark. Its header logo and favicon were a hand-copied version of the icon compiled into the site generator, so when the mark was redrawn they kept publishing the previous one on every page. The generator now reads assets/brand/oaa-mark.svg and fails when it is missing, so the site cannot hold a mark of its own again.

• The oaa CLI is published again. It was built with dart compile exe, which refuses a package whose dependencies have build hooks — oaa_engine has one — so no CLI reached a release at all. It is built with dart build cli now and ships as an archive of the executable and the engine beside it rather than as a single file; keep the two together. CI builds it the same way and runs the result, which nothing did before.

• The Windows package builds. Its manifest named the application Open Audio Analyzer where a package identifier is required, which the rename from Bel introduced and which fails validation with a line number and no mention of the name; the identifier is Oaa and the display name is unchanged.

• The Linux flatpak builds. Two things stopped it. Installing the runtime used a partial reference, which makes flatpak ask which of the matching ones is meant — a question -y does not answer and a CI runner cannot — so the job waited instead of failing. And the scalable icon was read through gdk-pixbuf by the AppStream step, which cannot decode an SVG unless librsvg has registered a loader; where it has not, a valid file is reported as an unrecognised format and the build fails with the package already assembled. The flatpak now ships the seven PNG sizes and no scalable icon, which is what a launcher uses either way.

🚧 Internal

• The install pages name the files a release actually publishes. Every installer is built as Open Audio Analyzer-<version>-… and GitHub replaces the spaces with periods when it attaches it, so the documented names — and the two shell commands printed for a reader to paste — matched nothing on the releases page. They are dot-separated now, and the difference is explained where it appears.

• Every identifier follows the name. The public C ABI is oaa_* and OAA_* in engine/include/oaa/oaa.h, the packages are oaa_core, oaa_ui, oaa_engine and oaa_wire, and the plugin’s classes are Oaa*. OAA_ABI_VERSION stays at 4: the header’s shape did not move, only its spelling.

• The release workflow reads OAA_SIGNING_IDENTITY, OAA_NOTARY_PROFILE, OAA_WINDOWS_CERT, OAA_WINDOWS_CERT_PASS and OAA_WINDOWS_PUBLISHER. The repository secrets have to be renamed to match, or every signed artefact quietly stops being signed.

• The repository, the documentation site and every download link moved to open_audio_analyzer.

• The cross-implementation wire golden is now plugin/test/golden/wire_v2.bin, regenerated from oaa_wire_fixture.

• The released sections below describe the application under its former name. They were renamed with the rest of the repository rather than left to contradict it; nothing else about them was rewritten.

• Stopping the engine decides whether to join on the flag that tracks the thread. It tested should_run — the flag stop itself clears — so anything that ever cleared it elsewhere would have turned destroying an engine into a free underneath a live analysis thread. It now tests whether a thread was started and not yet joined.

• PersistenceLayer is gone, and with it the last toImageSync in the application. PointBuckets replaces it: marks sorted by the colour they are drawn in, so a display of thirty thousand of them is a few dozen calls rather than thirty thousand. test/history_modules_test.dart fails if any of the three modules creates an image between frames again.

• packages/oaa_wire — the wire protocol, pure Dart and MIT, specified byte for byte in docs/WIRE.md. Three implementations speak it and none of them was written against another: the app’s host, the app’s display, and the plugin’s C++ sender. plugin/test/golden/wire_v2.bin holds the Dart codec against bytes the C++ actually produced, which is the only test that would catch the two drifting apart — and the drift is silent, because every frame is a fixed length, so a field written into the wrong slot still parses.

• MeterSource — the interface a meter module reads a measurement out of, in oaa_core. OaaEngine implements it and so does the remote display’s decoder, which is what lets the twelve modules run unchanged on a tablet with no engine in it. oaa_engine now depends on oaa_core for that one interface; the arrow still points away from dart:ffi.

• MeterClock decides what is new by comparing generations rather than by trusting what refresh() returned. With the remote host refreshing on its own timer there are two callers, and a one-shot “is this new” answer is consumed by whichever asks first — leaving the other to stop repainting, silently, only on the machines where somebody was using both screens at once.

• plugin/ is AGPL-3.0-or-later, not GPL-3.0. JUCE 7 and 8 are AGPLv3-or-commercial; only JUCE 6 offered GPLv3, which is what the plan was written against. Open Audio Analyzer takes the AGPLv3 option, which changes the licence of the plugin binary alone: the engine stays MIT, and the app stays GPL-3.0-or-later because it never links JUCE — it talks to the plugin over a socket. GPLv3 section 13 expressly permits the combination. One piece of good news the plan did not anticipate: Steinberg has relicensed the VST3 SDK to MIT, so JUCE is the only copyleft dependency and no separate SDK checkout is needed.

• engine/CMakeLists.txt builds liboaa as a static library for consumers that are not Dart. There are now two descriptions of the same compile, because a plugin CI runner has no Flutter SDK and a build hook cannot be handed to JUCE; plugin/test/sources_match.sh fails the build if they drift apart.

• The C++ and Dart implementations of the wire protocol are held against a committed golden that the plugin’s own serialiser generates, rather than each end round-tripping against itself. A field transcribed into the wrong slot still parses — every frame is a fixed length — so the app would draw a spectrum out of the scope buffer and look entirely plausible doing it. The golden asserts NaN and negative infinity survive unchanged, both being bit patterns a careless serialiser normalises.

• JUCE 8.0.15 is pinned and fetched rather than vendored, so the repository does not grow by 110 MB to record a version number.

• miniaudio v0.11.25 vendored under engine/third_party/ (public domain / MIT-0), with everything but the device layer compiled out.

• dr_wav 0.14.6, dr_flac 0.13.4 and dr_mp3 0.7.4 vendored under engine/third_party/dr_libs/ (public domain / MIT-0), compiled in one translation unit separate from the device layer. MA_NO_DECODING in oaa_device.c is what stops miniaudio compiling its own bundled copies of the same three and colliding with them at link time — it was already load-bearing for measurement correctness and is now load-bearing for the build as well.

• MP3 is the last format tried when identifying a file, not the first. dr_mp3 recognises a file by scanning for something that parses as a frame, and arbitrary binary data contains such sequences often enough that, given first refusal, it will open a FLAC file and decode noise from it.

• OAA_ABI_VERSION is 4. The change is additive — oaa_snapshot is byte for byte what it was at 3 — and adds only the oaa_file_* decoding calls.

• File paths reach the decoder as UTF-8 and are widened to UTF-16 on Windows. dr_libs’ plain _init_file calls go through fopen, which reads the path in the process’s ANSI code page; an umlaut in a user name is enough to make a file unopenable on one platform only, with an error that says nothing about encoding.

• Cancelling an analysis goes through a flag in native memory rather than by killing the worker isolate, which would leak the engine and the open decoder it was holding. A message cannot reach an isolate busy in a decode loop that never yields to its event queue; a pointer both isolates can read can.

• The conformance suite generates its own signals rather than reading WAV fixtures, so it runs on a headless runner with no network and no decoder.

• Loudness is asserted to be independent of both sample rate and push block size — properties the standard does not state but which catch two classes of error that 48 kHz single-block tests cannot.

• pffft vendored under engine/third_party/ (FFTPACK licence, permissive), and the maths-constant feature macro added to the build hook’s POSIX defines — M_PI is XSI rather than ISO C, and asking glibc for a POSIX level hides it. Linux-only compile failure, the same shape as the Phase 0 clock_gettime one.

• One set of transforms feeds the analyser, the spectrogram and the stereo cloud. Three modules running their own FFT over the same audio would cost three times as much and could disagree about where a peak is.

• Three primitives came out of writing the modules rather than being guessed at in advance: a shared dB scale and graticule, a paragraph cache that re-lays out only when a formatted string actually changes, and a buffer of marks sorted by the colour they are drawn in, which is how a display made of tens of thousands of them stays a few dozen draw calls.

• The accumulating modules advance on the engine’s publish counter rather than on every paint, so a resize or a theme change cannot scroll a spectrogram through time that no audio passed through.

• The canvas placement rules — overlap, clamping, id allocation — are pure functions over TabSpec in oaa_core, so they are covered by tests that need no window, and so the remote display cannot come to a different conclusion about where a module goes than the app did.

• The canvas and workspace tests build their own sparse layouts instead of reading geometry off the default preset. What the app opens with is a product decision, and a drag test that measured itself against it failed the day the default improved.

• Dragging a module rebuilds nothing. The module stays where it is and one painter draws where it would land, so pointer movement cannot stall a canvas of live meters.

• Module painters now extend a MeterPainter base and the module frame’s chrome is painted rather than decorated. CustomPainter.hitTest and BoxDecoration both absorb pointer events by default, which left every meter’s face unclickable with nothing reported anywhere.

• .github/workflows/ci.yml now runs dart test packages/oaa_wire and plugin/test/sources_match.sh. Both were named as gates in CLAUDE.md and README.md for a phase before either was wired in, which is the worst state for a gate to be in: everybody believes it is running.

• .github/workflows/release.yml builds the four installers and the CLI on a tag and on demand. On demand matters — an installer built only at release time is one whose script has been broken for weeks by the time anyone finds out.

• .github/workflows/docs.yml builds the documentation site on every pull request and publishes it from main.

• tool/docs.dart generates the site with no dependencies, so the docs job is a Dart SDK and no Flutter. The page list is written out rather than globbed, so docs/PLAN.md cannot be published to users by accident.

• packaging/icon/make_icons.dart describes the mark once as geometry and renders every size the installers want. Exported by hand, thirty-odd files across four containers drift.

• The project has a logo, in assets/brand/: the icon’s four bars with the tile taken away, and the name set beside them over two lines. It is the same mark as the application icon rather than a second one, and the wordmark is Inter SemiBold converted to outlines so the file needs no font installed. Three files — the lockup for dark backgrounds, the lockup for light ones, and the mark on its own. Nothing bundles them; they are for the README, the site and anywhere else the project is shown.

• make_icons.dart draws the mark in three shapes rather than one, because the desktops, iOS and Android each mask it differently, and writes iOS without an alpha channel — an icon that has one is refused by the App Store on upload rather than at build time.

• The canvas’s refusal toast is a provider rather than private widget state, so the shortcut layer above the canvas reports “no room for that” through the same channel a refused drop does instead of growing a second one.

• The README leads with the application icon, a badge row, a table of contents and the documentation site, and it now enumerates the thirteen modules and what each one shows — a count it stated and never listed. Presentation only: nothing it says about what Open Audio Analyzer measures changed.

0.1.0 — 2026-08-15

First release. The architecture is proven end to end and the app runs; most meters do not exist yet. See the roadmap.

📐 Measurement

• Peak, peak max, RMS, crest factor, inter-channel correlation and stereo balance are measured. Peak uses a 1.5 s hold and a 20 dB/s fall; RMS is smoothed with a 300 ms time constant.
• Every loudness quantity is unmeasured and reads as a dash — LUFS-M, LUFS-S, LUFS-I, LRA, true peak, TP max, DR-S, DR-I, PLR and PSR. They are NaN behind OAA_FLAG_LOUDNESS_UNAVAILABLE, never a zero that looks like a reading. K-weighting, R128 gating, LRA and true-peak oversampling arrive in the same release as the EBU conformance vectors that prove them.
• Open Audio Analyzer does not implement Decibel’s proprietary TrueDyn and will not approximate it. DR-S and DR-I are defined in docs/METRICS.md instead, reproducibly.
• All dB readings clamp to a −144.0 floor rather than negative infinity, so that differences between them stay finite.

✨ Added

• A C11 measurement engine with a lock-free snapshot, published by a dedicated analysis thread and read once per frame over FFI with no allocation.
• A built-in 1 kHz test signal, so the engine is measurable on a machine with no audio hardware.
• The Precision Instrument design system: one spacing scale, one border weight, no shadows, tabular figures on every number.
• A domain model with a 24-column grid layout, delivery-target calibrations for streaming, podcast, EBU R 128, ATSC A/85 and CD, and forward-compatible preset serialisation that skips module kinds a build does not have.
• Number Box module and the application shell.

🐛 Fixed

• The analysis loop no longer runs progressively slower than real time on a loaded machine. nanosleep only guarantees at least the delay requested, so every block overshoots slightly under contention; the loop discarded that error on each iteration instead of absorbing it, and on an oversubscribed host it settled at about a third of real speed. Lateness up to 250 ms is now made up one block at a time, and only a longer stall — a laptop waking from sleep, a debugger — resynchronises.

🚧 Internal

• Native code builds through a Dart build hook on all five platforms. There is no CMakeLists.txt, podspec or build.gradle for it anywhere.
• POSIX feature-test macros are declared in the build hook. Without them -std=c11 hides clock_gettime and nanosleep, which built cleanly on the development machine and failed on both POSIX CI runners.
• CI runs analysis, formatting, and the domain, widget and engine suites, with the engine built on Linux, macOS and Windows.
• Licensing is split: MIT for engine/, oaa_engine and oaa_core; GPL-3.0-or-later for the application, UI, CLI and plugin.