WaveFlow 1.8.0 ڈاؤن لوڈ

1.8.0 (2026-09-30)
✨ What's new in v1.8.0
WaveFlow 1.8.0 — every word, every detail. Lyrics now follow you everywhere, highlighted word by word and floating on your desktop; exclusive output now works across Windows, Linux and macOS; your playlists take their colours from their covers; and WaveFlow talks to the rest of your setup, from MPD clients to your own server.
Our biggest release yet: 119 issues closed, most of them reported by people who took the time to tell us what they hit. Still 100% local-first.
🎧 Your audio hardware, properly used
- Exclusive output on all three systems — WASAPI on Windows, ALSA on Linux, CoreAudio on macOS. WaveFlow can take the sound card for itself, for ordinary playback as well as DSD.
- DSD over PCM (DoP) sends the original DSD stream to a compatible DAC without converting it to PCM first. It ships switched off — turn it on under Settings → Playback and audio if you own the hardware.
- The output device menu tells the truth: what each device actually accepts, and which one really opened rather than the one that was asked for. When playback has to drop out of exclusive mode, you are told.
- ReplayGain, done properly — album gain, a pre-amp, a fallback level for untagged tracks, and clipping prevention, all adjustable.
- Opus and AIFF are now supported.
- WaveFlow remembers where you were: the resume point is saved on exit and as you listen.
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The output device menu listing each device with the formats it actually accepts
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🎤 Lyrics, everywhere you look
- Floating desktop lyrics — a window that sits above everything else, so the words are there while you work. Resizable from any side, one line or two.
- Karaoke that highlights word by word, and when a provider only gives line timings, WaveFlow estimates the timing of each word itself — so the karaoke runs on almost any synced lyrics.
- Lyrics in the mini-player too, with the same word-by-word karaoke as the immersive view, the lyrics panel and the floating window.
- Romanization puts a readable line under Japanese, Korean and Chinese lyrics, and translations sit alongside the original.
- Backing vocals, duets and instrumental breaks — backing vocals sit under the line they belong to, the second voice of a duet answers from the other side, both lines stay lit while two voices overlap, and three dots breathe through the instrumental parts.
- Held notes ripple through their letters in the immersive view, stronger the longer the note is held. You can switch it off.
- Pick a lyrics plugin by hand from the lyrics source menu, and plugins now get the album, the track's length and its ISRC, so they find the right recording rather than a namesake.
- A colour for the line being sung — one of eight pastels, or a rainbow that moves to the next colour with every line.
- Calmer on the network: a track with no lyrics stops re-searching every time you open it, you can switch off any provider you don't want, and whole genres can be skipped.
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The floating desktop lyrics window over a desktop, showing the current line
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🎨 Your library, brought to life
- Playlists take their colour from their cover — the header is built from the artwork, or you pick the colour yourself and it stays.
- Canvas plays a short looping clip in place of the cover while a track is on, in a frame shaped for it.
- The immersive view puts it all together: artwork, clip, and lyrics synced to the word.
- Artist pages get a full-width backdrop you can choose.
- The mini-player keeps up with all of it: Canvas clips, the cover slideshow, and a volume slider with mute.
- A high-contrast mode that works across every theme and skin.
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A playlist page whose header takes its colour from the album artwork above the track list
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The immersive view: a track's Canvas clip looping beside lyrics synced word by word, with a romanization under each line
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🔌 It talks to the rest of your setup
- MPD server — drive playback from the MPD clients you already use. Off unless you turn it on.
- Plugins — an in-app store with verified installs. Release Radar finds recent releases from the artists in your library, Apple Motion Artwork and TIDAL Artwork bring animated covers, BiniLyrics adds word-by-word lyrics with backing vocals and duets, and Web Radio carries 30 000+ stations.
- A WaveFlow server, if you run one, now merges its catalogue into your library: browse both from one list, keep a track on disk, or import it.
▶️ Playback
- Album shuffle shuffles whole records, and Mood radio and Daily Mix can build their sessions out of whole albums.
- Mood radio ranks tracks by how well they fit the mood.
- Playback buttons under the Windows taskbar thumbnail.
- Playing a track from your history queues the ones after it too, and single-click play no longer restarts the track on a double-click.
📚 Library
- Browse by folder, and find Chinese titles by their pinyin.
- A "Needs attention" tab for tracks missing something.
- Find artists that are really several names joined by commas, and split them.
- Tag editing that is safe for your files, and now reaches DSD.
- Star ratings reach your files reliably, ID3v2 included, and the tag editor suggests values as you type.
- Smart playlists: ten new rule types, relative time windows, and a live count while you build.
- Artist pages list every track the artist is credited on, features included, and an artist who only appears as an album artist ("Various Artists") gets a page too.
- A rescan keeps each album with its album artist: a compilation, or an album with an explicit album artist, is no longer handed to whichever track was rescanned first.
🖥️ Interface
- Settings reorganised, with a search box, and switches instead of tick boxes.
- Back and forward remember where you were.
- A native-looking window frame on Linux and macOS.
- A cover slideshow behind the now-playing view.
- A radio station fills the immersive view with its artwork.
- A switch to hide animated covers altogether.
- Put the mini-player back to its default size and corner from Settings, or by double-clicking its drag handle.
- On from the start: the lyrics column in the immersive view, and the spectrum visualizer, now in rainbow. If you had set them yourself, your choice stays.
🛠️ Reliability
- A launch that never paints anything falls back to software rendering on its own next time.
- Switching profiles no longer inherits the previous profile's audio settings.
- A setting you change reaches every window.
- A plugin that cannot load says so instead of failing silently.
- After an automatic crossfade, lyrics and the progress bar no longer run a few seconds behind the music.
- An album's embedded cover follows its first track.
- A motion cover you set by hand now shows during playback.
- On Linux, animated covers now play, and the AppImage no longer rescans its video plugins at every launch.
- On Linux, the immersive view no longer blacks out when an animated cover appears, and the output device you picked is found again at launch.
- The exclusive-output switch shows what you chose, even when the device refused it.
- A sound device that keeps failing no longer fills your disk with logs or keeps a CPU core busy: WaveFlow steps back and retries less and less often. Logs are kept seven days, 50 MB a day at most.
- Your library is copied before every database upgrade, and the last three copies are kept.
- On Windows, a minimised or hidden window gives memory back while the mini-player plays.
- The AppImage opens folders and links again.
- A profile backup imports even while the profile it came from still exists, under a free name — and export and import say they are running.
🌍 Languages
- All 17 languages were reviewed line by line, five of them — Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean and German — by native speakers.
- Several hundred strings changed: wording translated too literally, terms that did not match between screens, and a few sentences that said the opposite of the English.
⚠️ One removal: the Spotify integration
It is gone. It needed you to register a developer application before anything worked, it was unreliable, and very few people ever got that far.
- If you had connected an account, the stored token is deleted when you update — there is nothing for you to do.
- Daily Mix and On Repeat are WaveFlow's own and stay, and Canvas clips never depended on it.
📦 Recommended install
Use your platform's package manager when one is available, so updates keep flowing through the tool you already use.
Windows
winget install InstaZDLL.WaveFlow
Arch / Manjaro / EndeavourOS / CachyOS
yay -S waveflow-bin
# or: paru -S waveflow-bin
Fedora / RHEL / Rocky / Alma / CentOS Stream
sudo dnf copr enable instazdll/waveflow
sudo dnf install waveflow
Debian / Ubuntu / Mint / Pop!_OS
The Debian package is wave-flow (kebab-case, required by the Debian naming spec — Tauri bundles it that way from the WaveFlow product name).
sudo install -d -m 0755 /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://packages.buildkite.com/instazdll/waveflow/gpgkey \
| sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/waveflow.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/waveflow.gpg] https://packages.buildkite.com/instazdll/waveflow/any/ any main" \