Quill Radio 3.0 Release Notes

There is a moment, early on, that decides how somebody feels about a piece of software. It is not the moment they discover the clever feature. It is the moment just after they open it, when the app either tells them where they are or leaves them to work it out.

Quill Radio 2.1 left you to work it out. It opened on an empty favorites tree – an accurate picture of having no favorites, and an answer to none of the questions anybody actually arrives with.

So that is where this release starts, and it is where these notes start too. What follows is a story in two parts. The first is your first hour with Quill Radio 3.0, told from the beginning, assuming nothing. The second is for everybody coming from 2.1.2 who already knows this app and wants to know what moved underneath them.

Read the first part even if you are the second kind of reader. A good deal of 3.0 is in it. And it ends where the app is going: how Quill Radio sits beside QUILL Cast, what each of them is for, and what is being built next in each.

Part One: Your first hour

The first minute

Open Quill Radio for the first time and it introduces itself. Three screens. Not seven – three.

1. Welcome to Quill Radio. What it is, that it is built for listening with a screen reader, that nothing here needs an account and nothing you listen to leaves your computer, and the one key that carries most of the app.
2. Find something to listen to. The three ways in: Browse Stations, Search All Sources at the top of that tree, and Add Station for an address you already have.
3. Keep the ones you like. How favorites work, that the first ten answer a key each, and that Radio keeps playing while you work.

Skip is a real button, sitting with Back and Next, and skipping counts as done. Somebody who already knows what an internet radio is should be able to leave in one keystroke.

It never runs for somebody who already has favorites – an imported station list, a restored backup, an upgrade from any earlier Quill Radio. Explaining how to find a first station to somebody with forty is a way of saying nobody checked.

Every key it teaches is the key you have. The screens are rendered against your live keymap, so if you rebound Browse Stations, it names your key.

And the words are in a text box you can arrow through, not a wall of labels. Somebody who missed a sentence can go back over it at their own pace, and copy it, instead of asking the app to say it all again.

On the second and third screens a Browse Stations Now… button takes you straight out to find something. Taking it counts as finished: somebody who went and found a station has been onboarded, whatever screen they were on.

And then it stays quiet

Behind a checkbox on that first screen – Show me a tip now and then – are six things worth knowing that no button label can tell you: that live radio can be paused and rewound; that Radio remembers a volume for each station separately; that a recording can be scheduled for a programme that has not started yet, and will wake the computer to catch it; that Sound Enhancements can be set for one station rather than all of them; that Browse Stations reopens where you left it; that Song History keeps every track a station announced while you listened.

Each appears once, ever, the first time you reach somewhere it would help. None of them takes the keyboard or interrupts you – they ride the same announcement path as everything else, so they reach speech and braille and then they are gone. Unchecking the box switches all of them off permanently.

Somewhere to start

Press Ctrl+B and Browse Stations opens onto thirty branches. In 2.1 there were thirteen.

Four of the new ones are axes the station directory always had and nobody had ever exposed. By Country opens a country, then its states or regions, then its stations, most-listened first. By Language is the same world on a different axis, and it is the one that is genuinely hard to find anywhere else: most radio apps organise by where a station is, which is the wrong organisation entirely if the radio you want is not in the language of the country you happen to be sitting in. Trending Now ranks by what is being listened to today, rather than by votes accumulated over years – the two lists disagree far more than you would expect. And Recently Added or Changed is the branch that makes a directory feel alive rather than archival.

The other new branches are whole libraries:

• Internet Archive – Old Time Radio, Audiobooks & Poetry, the Live Music Archive, Radio Programs, News & Public Affairs. Old Time Radio alone holds 8,710 recordings across 114 series.
• LibriVox – public-domain audiobooks, recently added, across 43 genres, and by author through some seven thousand of them.
• Project Gutenberg – the 1,124 records that carry human-read audio, by topic and by language.
• Audius, Mixcloud and ccMixter – independent music, DJ sets and radio shows, and Creative Commons music whose licence rides in the row itself.
• AudioPub – a community where people share audio they made, opening on a Discover shelf of fifty, different every time you open it.
• Explore – every station Wikidata knows about, by city, by format, and On the Dial, which groups stations by where they sit in the FM band.
• My Servers – your own Icecast or SHOUTcast address. The branch no directory can give you: the community station three towns over, the church, the school, the reading service running its own box. You supply the address once and browse it forever, each stream listed with what is playing on it right now.
• Networks – the BBC, NPR, CBC, ABC Australia, RTE, RNZ, NHK, Deutsche Welle, Radio France and the rest, gathered into one-click lists.
• YouTube – channels, playlists and single videos. More on that shortly.

Twenty-eight branches is a good problem and still a problem. If you only ever open your local stations and ACB Media, every branch you never use is not clutter, it is distance. So Station > Choose Browse Sources… turns any branch off, and right-clicking a branch offers Hide This Source on the spot. The rule that matters: a branch that is off is not in the tree at all, and is never contacted. Not hidden-but-fetched – gone. It is a privacy and speed control as much as a tidiness one.

Two smaller kindnesses. Expanding a country no longer flings your cursor down into the stations; you stay on the folder you opened, hear its count, and step in when you decide to. And Browse Stations remembers where you were, so it reopens on the source you were last in rather than collapsed at the top.

The radio that works before the internet does

Here is the part that surprises people.

Open By Country and it answers instantly. Not “fast” – instantly, under a millisecond – because the answer comes from your own disk. The whole working-station directory ships inside the app: more than 62,000 stations across 240 countries, every genre, language and codec, plus SomaFM and the complete Project Gutenberg audio shelf. All of it arrives with the app. A first launch on a machine with no internet at all is a complete radio.

It costs about seven and a half megabytes.

Because counting is now free, every folder tells you its size before you open it – “France, 812 stations” – something the live directory could never afford to say. Find Stations gains the same superpower: local matches appear the moment you type, with the live directories layering in behind them. Pull the network cable mid-search and you still get results.

And it is honest about its edges. Some branches stay live, each for a stated reason – Apple’s charts are rankings its terms bar storing, TuneIn’s directory may not be stored, the Internet Archive’s collections would dwarf the app, and charts are stale the moment they are saved. None of that is buried in a manual: View > Station Catalog Status lays out, source by source, what is stored on this computer and how fresh it is, and what is not stored and why. Highlight any branch in the tree and the details panel says either “Answers from your catalog, updated 2 hours ago” or “Asks the internet each time; nothing is stored.”

If you are offline, the app says so exactly once – “You are offline. Browsing from your catalog, updated this morning.” – and then gets out of the way, because quietly working is the feature.

The catalog keeps itself fresh three ways, each yours to switch off: a quick check shortly after launch, a scheduled trickle every 24 hours by default, and Station > Update Station Catalog on demand, which always answers out loud: “Station catalog updated: 174 new stations, 431 updated. Xiph could not be reached; keeping what you have.”

That last sentence is the whole philosophy. A directory that is down costs you its freshness, never your stations.

And your stations were never part of the deal. Favorites, custom stations, servers, YouTube channels – those live in their own files, and no catalog operation reads or writes them. Not carefully avoided: structurally elsewhere.

Type a title, and everything answers

Browsing is how you find something you could not have named. Search is how you get to something you can, and in 3.0 it reaches everything.

Press Ctrl+F. Type a title. The results carry radio stations, LibriVox books, Internet Archive recordings, Project Gutenberg audiobooks, podcasts, Audius tracks, Mixcloud shows, ccMixter uploads and YouTube videos – each row labelled with where it came from, so a book and a station are never confused.

The libraries answer separately from the stations and appear as they arrive, so one slow library never holds up the rest, and if you are already arrowing the station results when a library answers, your place is kept.

And what it finds, it plays. A podcast or an audiobook in the results is a work, not a stream – there is no single address to hand the player – and pressing Play on one used to do nothing at all. Now an Apple Podcasts show fetches its feed and plays the latest episode, a LibriVox book plays its first section, each announced by name.

Station > Search Sources… switches any of the eight sources off, and a source that is off is never contacted – so switching sources off makes searching genuinely faster and quieter, not just tidier. Your choices are remembered, because a preference you have to set again on every search is not really a preference.

And so are the searches themselves. Press Down in the station-name box and there are the searches you already ran, newest first. Pick one and all three fields come back together – name, tag and country – because they compose: jazz in France and jazz in Brazil are different searches, and a list that remembered only “jazz” would hand you back the wrong one. Running the same search again moves it up the list rather than adding a second copy of it, and an empty search is never kept, because clearing the boxes is how you start over rather than something to come back to.

A row that probably will not play now says so. Radio Browser runs its own checker against every stream it lists and publishes the answer. Quill Radio has been downloading that on every single search since the beginning and throwing it away, so every row in the results made exactly the same silent promise and the only way to find the dead ones was to press Enter on each in turn. Rows the directory could not play are now marked “may not be playable”, and rows that have to be looked up before they can start – TuneIn, YouTube – say that instead, so a pause before the audio begins is explained rather than worrying.

Everything else stays quiet, on purpose. Only Radio Browser publishes a check, so labelling the rest “unknown” would put a word on nearly every row in the app to tell you nothing. And nothing here is scored or guessed at from bitrates and vote counts: the only bad news the app will give you about a station is the listing directory’s own.

Find inside the tree got clever, too. “Find in this folder” used to walk the subtree and match whatever happened to be loaded – honest, bounded, and on the Podcasts branch useless, because it crawled chart pages and never once asked Apple’s search engine. Find now takes the fastest honest route for wherever you are standing: the real podcast search API on the Podcasts branch, your own catalog on a catalog-served branch, and each library’s own search engine everywhere one exists. Every answer says where it came from – “Searched the whole podcast directory.” or “From your catalog.” – because a fast answer whose origin is stated beats a fast answer you might mistake for a complete one.

Press Enter

The thing no other desktop player does

A described audio track is a second narration mixed into a programme that says what a sighted viewer can see: who came into the room, what the caption on screen says, where the scene moved to. Broadcasters publish them as a matter of course. YouTube carries them on a growing number of videos.

And essentially no desktop media player lets a blind listener find one. The better ones expose an audio-track menu, and what it contains is “Track 1, Track 2, Track 3”. Which of those narrates the picture? The only way to find out is to play each in turn and listen. That is not a feature, it is a puzzle, and it is the exact shape of the problem this app was built to stop.

Quill Radio names them.

Playback > Audio and Described Audio… (Ctrl+Shift+A) lists every audio track a video publishes – “English”, “Spanish”, “English (described) – narrates what is on screen” – with the described one first, the cursor already on it, and a line above the list that says, before anything else you hear, “Described audio is available for this video.”

Playback > Play Described Audio (Ctrl+Alt+D) skips the list and switches straight to it.

And it tells you, without being asked. Play a video that carries a described track and Quill Radio says so once: “Described audio is available for this video. Press Ctrl+Alt+D to hear the narration of what is on screen.” Once per video, never repeated, never interrupting.

That sentence is the feature. A command you have to know about only helps people who already know it exists – and those are exactly the people who least need telling.

Three things about it are deliberate. Switching keeps your place, because losing your position an hour into a film to turn description on would make the feature useless in precisely the case it matters most. Nothing is promoted behind your back: the ordinary track is still right there, still labelled. And when there is none, it says so, and says what there is instead – “This video has one audio track, English. No described audio was published.” – because “no described audio” on its own leaves you wondering whether the video is missing it or the app cannot find it, and those are completely different things to know.

The same door opened every dubbed track. A multi-language video now lists all its renditions by name – one popular video offers twenty-four, from Hindi and Tamil to Japanese and Polish – each spoken as a language, never as a code or a track number.

Getting YouTube to hand over those described tracks took a genuine fight. The long version is in the in-depth companion.

Anything with an end has a timeline

A live station is a river; you step in where everyone else is. Anything finished is the opposite, and 3.0 treats it that way. On any finished video or recording:

The chapter list reads each entry as a whole sentence – “3. Introducing layers, starts at 5 minutes 31 seconds” – and marks the one playing now.

Every one of these says why when it declines. Point any of them at a live stream and you hear “This is a live stream, so there is no timeline to move along”, not silence. A slider that cannot move and a “next chapter” that quietly does nothing are worse than not offering them at all, because you cannot tell a broken control from a stream that has no timeline.

Reading instead of listening

A finished video’s captions, and a podcast episode’s published transcript, can now be read as text that still knows what time it is. Playback > Transcript… (Ctrl+Shift+T) opens an ordinary read-only text box – deliberately, so arrow keys, word and line movement, selection and your screen reader’s review cursor all work exactly as they do everywhere else.

What the timings add is everything around the edges. Your cursor is yours: playback never moves it, because you are reading and the audio can wait. Enter on any line jumps playback to the moment that line was spoken. Ctrl+F searches and announces the hit as “Found at 12 minutes 8 seconds. Enter plays from here.” – so the verb that acts on what you just found is the next key you press. That is the thing a transcript in a text file can never do for you.

There is a Links… button (Ctrl+Shift+L) that lists every web address in the transcript and opens or copies one, because reading an address out of a read-only box and retyping it is not a way to follow a link. Save As offers plain text, WebVTT or SubRip, and Open in QUILL hands it over as a document to annotate or braille.

An automatic caption track says so, in the heading, every time. Machine transcripts are useful and they are not accurate; presenting one as if a person wrote it would be the sort of confident wrong answer this app refuses to give.

And a transcript is readable without playing anything: an episode whose feed publishes one says “transcript available” on its row and offers View Transcript… on its context menu. YouTube rows do the same.

And you can see the picture, if you want it

Playback > Show Video (Ctrl+Shift+V), and the whole design is one sentence: video is a view onto what is playing, never a mode of playing. Closing the window, or never opening it, leaves Quill Radio behaving exactly as it always has. Opening it attaches to a stream that is already playing, so it does not restart anything and cannot cost you your place.

Why this matters in an app built for blind listeners: somebody with usable residual vision, who uses Quill Radio precisely because YouTube’s own site is hostile with a screen reader, was getting audio only. So was anybody wanting to share what they are listening to with a sighted person in the room.

The picture reports itself properly. This is where video players usually fail: the image is an unnamed window a screen reader lands on and calls “graphic”. Here it has a real name – “Video: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, part 4” – and a description saying what it is and where the controls are. It is in the tab order exactly once, Tab always leaves it, and it never grabs focus by itself.

There are no on-screen buttons, on purpose. Every command is on the Playback menu, in the Command Palette, and on a key you can change. Captions (Ctrl+Shift+K) default to solid white on solid black, because caption text sits over arbitrary moving pictures and an opaque box is the only honest default; they scale to 300%, because the standard asks for 200% and a floor is not a target. The picture can be dimmed for light sensitivity, and the keystroke that removes it works from anywhere in the app.

Keep what you find

Favorites, exactly the way you arranged them

If you have ever hand-sorted thirty stations into the order that makes sense to you, this part is a love letter. Moving a favorite from a sorted A-to-Z view no longer quietly overwrites that hand-built order: Quill Radio switches to manual order, says so, then moves the station, leaving your arrangement intact.

When a long haul of arrow presses feels absurd, Mark and Move does it in one gesture: right-click a station, choose Mark for Move, travel to the destination, and pick Move Marked Above or Move Marked Below. Ctrl+Shift+E makes a New Folder from anywhere. And the first ten favorites answer a key each – Ctrl+Alt+Shift+1 through 0 – playing directly without opening anything.

Downloads: the things you are allowed to keep

Quill Radio plays a great deal that is genuinely yours – public-domain audiobooks, old-time radio, Creative Commons music, podcast episodes published for exactly this purpose. Until now it could play all of that and save none of it.

Download… on a row’s menu saves it. Download All Files… on a book’s folder saves the whole thing, chapter by chapter, in order, while you carry on listening to something else.

A whole book is the case this was built for. A LibriVox novel is forty chapters and forty separate addresses – an hour of transferring over a connection that will hiccup at least once. So chapters are fetched in order, which means a part-finished book is the first twelve chapters, something you can start listening to, rather than a scattering you cannot. One bad address costs one chapter, never the book. Progress is counted the way a person counts: “12 of 40”.

And it will not save what is not yours to save. A source has to be affirmatively allowed; anything unrecognised is refused rather than guessed at. Where Download is not offered, asking for it anyway tells you which of four quite different things is true:

View > Downloads… is the queue – what is waiting, what is going, what arrived, what failed. Finished rows stay until you clear them, because “did that actually download?” is the question people ask most and a list that tidies itself away cannot answer it.

Where things land is arranged for you and every rule is yours (Station > Download Preferences…): a podcast goes under its show, a book gets a folder of its own, and an author gets a folder only once you have more than one of their books – since an author folder holding exactly one book is a folder you open and immediately leave. A downloaded book then plays like a book: chapters in order (2 before 10, which is obvious to a person and wrong in every naive sort), each announcing itself briefly – “4 of 40, The Dead Hand” – and the end of a book says so rather than falling silent.

A Creative Commons licence travels with the file, written into a small text file beside the audio, because saving somebody’s work under a licence and dropping the licence strips exactly the information it exists to carry.

Your place, kept

Playback > Continue Listening… shows everything you began and did not finish, newest first, with how far in you are: “The Moonstone, chapter 4, recording, 10 minutes in, 8% through”. Files on your own computer are in the list too, and your place in a file is remembered by the file’s contents rather than its name, so it survives moving and renaming.

Two deliberate refusals: four seconds in is not a position, and finishing clears it, so replaying something starts at the start rather than at the closing credits. A live station never appears at all – you tune in and you are where everybody else is, and a radio that offered to “resume” a live stream would be offering nonsense.

And a real backup

Station > Back Up Stations and Settings… gathers your favorites, settings, wake timer and recording schedule – and, if you want them, your recorded shows – into a single .qrbackup file. Restore from Backup… brings it all home on a new PC, a new BrailleNote, or a fresh Windows.

Underneath that, your favorites protect themselves: every change snapshots the previous version aside, and the last 20 are kept, so a bad edit or an accidental delete is never final. That safety net is what makes the Favorites Manager’s Remove All… safe to offer at all.

Make it yours

One volume, when you want one. Quill Radio remembers a volume for each favorite, which is lovely when stations are mastered at wildly different levels and maddening when you simply want everything quieter. Playback > Use One Volume for All Stations makes a single level answer for everything. Ticking it adopts whatever you are hearing at that moment, so nothing lurches, and unticking it puts every station straight back to its own remembered level – so trying it costs you nothing.

Sound, on Ctrl+E. The three-band equalizer, compressor, channel mode, night mode and broadcast polish have been here since 1.0.2 and never had a key of their own. Everything inside previews live as you move a slider. New in 3.0: Quill Radio can run the actual OptiLab Core engine – Lanes Audio’s real broadcast processing code, included in the build – rather than an impression of it. Exact OptiLab processing is off by default; “When saving” is the recommended setting, because a recording is processed once, afterwards, where taking a little longer costs nothing.

Everything it says now reaches braille. What’s Playing, a finished refresh, a recording starting – all of it is written to a connected braille display, not only spoken. Nothing is truncated, an identical message inside two seconds does not steal the display twice, and braille never costs speech: an unplugged display degrades to “spoke but did not braille”, never to silence. Announcement Self-Test… announces a phrase and then tells you which channels actually delivered it, so “braille is broken” and “no display is connected” stop looking the same.

A status bar you can walk into. View > Show Status Bar, then F6 to land in it: what is playing, the volume, whether a recording is running and how long it has left, the sleep timer, how many favorites you have, and the time. Arrow across the cells and press Enter on one to act – Enter on Now Playing opens What’s Playing, on Volume mutes, on Recording starts or stops a capture. Escape hands focus straight back to your favorites.

The recording cell is careful about which number it shows you. Ask for an hour and it counts down to the end you chose. Press Record Now, where you asked for no length at all, and it counts up – “18 min so far” – because the only figure it has in that case is a safety cap that stops a forgotten capture filling a disk, and counting down to that would be announcing a plan you never made.

And you can trim the app to what you use. View > Customize Features turns whole areas on or off, and Text Size (Normal, Large, Larger) enlarges the main window together. Every choice here is remembered.

When you want to ask, rather than be told

Quill Radio says a good deal at the moment it decides: a refresh announces itself, a damaged installation speaks once at launch, every menu item names its key as you pass it. All of that helps somebody the app has something to tell. None of it helps somebody with a question.

Three windows answer questions.

Audio Health (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+M) is the one to know about. It answers “is this going to work?” – which engine is actually playing (including the case where “automatic” has quietly fallen back to Windows Media because mpv is missing, a setting that still reads automatic and tells you nothing), whether mpv and FFmpeg are here and what their absence costs, where the audio is going and whether the system still offers the device you chose, what Sound Enhancements are doing and whether they are set for this station or all of them, and whether a recording started right now could actually be written to the folder you picked.

It tests nothing. No tone is played, no device opened, no file written – so it is safe to open in the middle of a two-hour capture, which is exactly when somebody wants it. And it counts problems rather than scoring health: there is no traffic light at the top inviting you to trust a summary over the sentences underneath it.

The Keyboard Shortcuts Sheet (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K) answers “what can I press?”. 3.0 made every menu item name its own key, which is a real fix while you are in a menu and no help at all when the question is the whole keyboard – the only answer to that was opening six menus and arrowing to the end of each. The sheet is one list, and you can type into it: filter by what you want to do (“record”), or by a key you found and cannot place (“Ctrl+B”).

It is built by reading the menu bar in front of you, which is the part that matters. Rebind something and the sheet says your key, not the default – and it can never drift from the menus, because it is the menus. The keys that have no menu item to carry them – F6 into the status bar, the Winamp letters in the Recordings player – are listed too, each with the window it works in.

And the columns are yours now (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C). This one is a speech setting wearing a display setting’s clothes. A list like Find Stations is read out one column at a time, so the columns are the sentence you hear on every row – and that sentence had been chosen once, in code, for everybody. If you never leave one country you heard a country on all sixty thousand rows. If you choose stations by who runs them, the source was read last.

View > Choose Columns… hands it over, for Find Stations results and for the Recordings list. There are two lists in the window – what is shown, in the order it is read, and what is hidden – with Move Up and Move Down between them. Not checkboxes: a checkbox in a list is a state your screen reader has to be asked for, while a position is a place you land on, and moving something says where it is now.

Hiding a column takes it out of the row rather than to the end of it, because a screen reader reads every column it is given and “last” is still read. It keeps its place while it is hidden, so bringing it back a week later does not send it to the end of a row you already arranged.

Under the two lists, one line reads out exactly what a row will say. That is the part worth having: you can hear the effect of hiding Country before you press OK, rather than pressing OK and finding out.

Each list also offers more than it shows, because a list that says everything says nothing. Find Stations can add Language, Genres, Popularity and Bitrate; Recordings can add Length – and Length is deliberately blank where the number Quill Radio holds is a disk-safety cap rather than a length you chose, because reading out a cap as a plan would be telling you something you never said. One column in each list cannot be hidden – the station’s name, the recording’s name – and asking to says so, and why.

QUILL Cast gets the same window on its own lists, from the same code. Quick Actions, listening statistics and folder actions all had to be carried across from one app to the other after being built twice; this one was shared on the first day.

The Recordings window now says what happens next. It used to count things: “14 recorded, 1 recording now, 3 scheduled”. That answers how many and never answers when, and when you are checking on a Thursday evening whether tonight’s show is covered, when is the entire question. It now opens with “Recording, 42 min left. Next: KFI at 11:00 tomorrow. 14 recorded.” – and a show inside the hour is given in minutes, because “in 12 minutes” tells you whether you can leave the room. Three schedules that all happen to be disabled say “none coming up” rather than reading as cover.

And the full What’s Playing window says where the song came from. Quill Radio looks for a track title in three places – the metadata carried along with the audio, the player’s own reading of the stream, and the station’s status page – and used to present whichever answered as one confident sentence. They are not the same kind of fact: a status page is something the station publishes for its own listing, and it can be a song behind what you are actually hearing. Now it says which one answered.

It also shows you what the station really sent, when that differs from what you are being shown. Stations pack a great deal into that field – advert markers, their own call sign, text="..." wrappers – and the song and artist are read out of it. That reading is usually right and is not always right, and now you can see both and judge.

Part Two: What moved, if you already knew this app

Everything above is new in 3.0. This part is for the reader coming from 2.1.2 – what changed shape underneath the app you already knew.

Stations that are not stations

Paste a YouTube link into Add Custom Station and it becomes a station. It plays through the same player, sits in Favorites, records with Record Now, and can be captured by a scheduled recording. Quill Radio saves the page address, never a stream address, and re-finds the audio each time – so a recording you schedule today still works next week.

It works out of the box: the yt-dlp helper is built in, so your first YouTube link simply plays, with no download and no consent prompt standing between you and the thing you asked for. When YouTube changes how it serves audio, Station > Update YouTube Support… fetches a newer helper rather than making you wait for the next Quill Radio release.

Around that grew a whole branch. Add a Channel…, Add a Playlist… and Add a Video…, or the one-command version – Station > Add YouTube Link… (Ctrl+Alt+N) – which files whatever you pasted by what the link actually is. Import YouTube Subscriptions… takes the subscriptions.csv from your own Google export and brings thirty channels across in one step, with nothing authenticated, no token stored, and no request made to Google at all. Add from YouTube Playlist lists a playlist in the uploader’s own running order, never re-sorted, because a series is meant to be worked through in order.

Podcasts, and not a single key anywhere. Open Podcasts (Apple), choose a country, and you get that storefront’s top shows and Apple’s entire genre tree. Open a show, press Enter on an episode, and it plays. No key, no account, no registration, no sign-in, nothing to configure first. The top podcasts in Ireland, or Japan, or Brazil are one folder away, which almost no desktop podcast client offers.

Apple stops being involved the moment you open a show: a show resolves to its own RSS feed, and everything after that comes from whoever makes the show. Subscribe to This Podcast files it in the shared podcast library, and the Subscriptions folder at the top of the branch counts itself – “Subscriptions (3)” – with each show beneath it wearing “(2 unheard)”. That library is shared with QUILL Cast, which is a bigger deal than it sounds; see Radio and Cast: two apps, one library below.

Paste a Live365 link and it just plays. The link you actually have is almost never the stream; it is the station page or the web player. Add Custom Station rewrites it to the real stream address and tells you it did – a pure text rewrite, with no network lookup and nothing sent anywhere.

Spotify (experimental) can be searched and browsed on any account tier, and played inside Quill Radio on Premium. Searching works on a free account, which is the part that is genuinely hard with a screen reader. The full setup walk – your own Client ID, why there is no shared identity, and what Spotify’s terms do and do not allow – is in the in-depth companion.

Playlists in the formats the internet actually uses. Quill Radio understood M3U; a “Listen Live” link is at least as likely to be a .pls, an .xspf or an .asx. All three now open, favorites export in all four formats, and every one reads back in. A live stream can no longer be imported as a list of stations – an .m3u8 manifest handed to the playlist importer used to produce a list of two-second fragments presented to you as stations.

One player, and every window can reach it

Quill Radio has only ever had one player. What it did not have was one keyboard. Speed, skip and chapters were menu items on the main window, and a menu accelerator only fires for the window that owns the menu bar – so standing in Browse Stations you could hear a podcast and be unable to change its speed. The window you were standing in decided which half of the player existed.

That is fixed at the root. Every transport verb is one row in one table, and the menus, the accelerators, the Command Palette and the player’s own buttons are all built from it. Four doors, one implementation. Ten windows answer to the whole transport now.

Go to Player (Ctrl+Shift+G) came from one question – “should the player be its own window? Can we make that magical some how?” The first answer was a summoned panel with no window of its own; listening changed it. The Player is now a real window: press Ctrl+Shift+G from anywhere and it opens – or, if it is already open somewhere behind you, comes to the front. It carries the whole transport, what is playing, where you are in it, the speed and the volume; it stands in the Window menu and the Ctrl+Tab rotation beside Browse and the managers; and its readout follows changes made in any other window. Escape closes it and focus returns to the window you came from.

Ctrl+Shift+P opens the Command Palette from every window, and the whole transport is in it. Every on/off command in the palette now carries its own state – “Announce Track Titles (currently On)” – because a palette has no checkmark, so the entry used to read the same whichever way the switch actually was, and you had to throw it to find out.

Every key now says what it did. The rule was already written down: a key that cannot act says why, because a silent key is indistinguishable from one that is not bound. The refusal path honoured it; the success path did not. Play/Pause, Stop and Mute all did their job and said nothing at all in every window but the main one. Mute was the worst of the three – silence is what muting is for, so with no word there was no way to tell muting apart from the stream dropping out.

And windows stay where you put them. Browse Stations, Search Stations, Manage Favorites and Schedule Recording were dialogs, and a dialog cannot carry a menu bar – so opening one made the menu bar seem to vanish, and the modal ones locked you out of the main window entirely. They are proper windows now – each a real, independent window with its own place in the taskbar and the Alt+Tab order, not an overlay floating glued over the main one – each carrying a menu bar, none holding the main window hostage. A new Window menu lists everything you have open, with Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+Shift+Tab and Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+9 to move between them; moving to a window lands you on the control you last used there. Asking for a window that is already open brings it to the front rather than opening a second copy, and each closes the way windows close: Escape, Ctrl+W, Ctrl+F4, Alt+F4, or the titlebar. Recordings, Downloads, Song History and the Now Playing viewer are windows of the same kind, so the whole app now moves under one set of window keys.

Every menu item tells you its key

Open any menu in 3.0 and every item ends with the way to reach it from the keyboard. Browse Stations is Ctrl+B, Find Stations Ctrl+F, Recordings Ctrl+Shift+R, Go To Ctrl+G. All 115 items, menus and submenus alike.

This was not a polish pass. Forty-nine items had no shortcut at all, which meant the only way to learn there was no faster route was to arrow through the whole menu and reach the end – a cost paid on every visit. Seven keys were claimed by two different items, so one of each pair silently did nothing. And two items advertised keys the toolkit was quietly discarding as unparseable, which is the worst of the three: a menu promising a shortcut that could never fire.

Where an item has a shortcut you can change, the menu shows the key you actually have bound. A build check now fails if any menu item ships without a working, unique key, so this stays true.

The main window’s own controls carry Alt keys too – Alt+M mutes, Alt+U reaches the volume slider – each using a letter the menu bar has not claimed, with a build check refusing any that does. (The transport buttons themselves left the main window in the surface redesign; their verbs live on the keys, the menus, and the Player window.)

Things that were quietly wrong, and are not now

Five worth knowing about, because every one of them was broken and not one announced itself.

Installing your apps in the wrong order cost you the playback engine. Quill Radio plays through mpv; without it the app drops to Windows Media and loses live pause and rewind, output-device choice, Volume Boost, track titles from the stream, stall detection, and every Ogg Vorbis, Opus and HLS station. The mpv library and FFmpeg are 306 MB together, so they are not built into the shared QuillVille Runtime that all seven apps use – four of those apps never call them, and Quill Weather’s installer was once 191 MB to read out a forecast. Each media app contributes what it needs instead.

That is a sound arrangement, and the install step did not honour it. The tools were installed by the same instruction as the runtime itself, which is skipped when a newer sibling app has already put a runtime on the machine. So installing QUILL Cast – which needs FFmpeg and not mpv – and then installing Quill Radio skipped Radio’s payload entirely, and mpv never arrived. Nothing said so. The app fell back, played most stations, and simply could not play some.

Reinstalling did not help either, though the app confidently said it would: the reinstall met the same skip. Both halves are fixed. The tools are now laid down unconditionally, so a machine ends up with the union of what its apps need whoever installed first, and reinstalling really does restore them.

And for the case where reinstalling is not the answer at all – the Lite installer downloads the base runtime and carries no media tools by design – Help > Get mpv Playback Engine… (Ctrl+Alt+M) simply fetches it, about 46 MB, the same checksum-pinned package the build itself uses. Audio Health has a button for it too, next to Get FFmpeg, lit only when pressing it would change something. It arrives with mpv’s licence texts and its corresponding-source offer, because those are part of shipping it rather than paperwork bolted on afterwards.

A station that hiccuped once was dead. This came in as a report while 3.0 was being finished, and it is the most consequential fix in the release: stations like KFI would play for about twenty seconds and then stop, or repeat their last five seconds. iHeart serves those as HLS – a thirty-second window of buffered audio behind a token that expires in five seconds – so missing a single refill looked exactly like the stream ending, and Quill Radio said “Stopped”. Now the connection heals itself at the transport level; a genuinely dropped station is reconnected out loud (“Reconnecting to KFI AM 640. Attempt 1 of 3.”); and iHeart stations are asked for their steadier progressive stream where one exists.

A reconnect counted its attempts out loud, to nobody. The code composed exactly the right sentence and wrote it into a field that nothing spoke and nothing displayed. What a listener actually got was one sound and then up to twenty-two seconds of silence – indistinguishable from the app having hung.

A recording that captured nothing said nothing. A recording file is created the moment recording begins, before a single second of audio arrives, so “the file is there” never meant “something was recorded”. A capture that saved nothing is now reported as what it is, with the reason – “Recording of 96.5 The Fan saved nothing: the connection failed. No file was kept.” – the empty file removed rather than left for you to find and wonder about, and the error sound used rather than the saved sound.

The status line stopped saying “playing” through silence. When a live stream ran out of audio, the app said “Buffering…” and left its playback state at playing, so the status bar and tray tooltip went on claiming playback through dead air – the one thing a listener can already tell is false. Buffering is its own state now, and reconnecting reads “Radio: Reconnecting to KFI AM 640. Attempt 2 of 3.” rather than connecting, which is what a station you just chose does.

Alongside those: recordings interrupted mid-capture are stitched back into one file under the name you expected; a recording whose file stops growing is noticed even when nothing reports a problem; every destructive question now defaults to No, so pressing Enter reflexively no longer destroys the thing; and deleting a row leaves your cursor on the row that took its place rather than at the top of the list.

The forensics on all of these – and a dozen more, including the 412 genres Xiph was losing on every refresh – are in the in-depth companion.

A recording that the computer is actually awake for

This one came from a listener, not a bug report, which is the only way it could have come. He scheduled a football pregame show for 11:00 and Quill Radio announced the recording at 11:03. Nothing had failed. Nothing said anything was wrong. He simply lost the first three minutes and had no way to find out why.

A schedule is a thread inside a running application, and a sleeping computer does not run threads. Quill Radio has always kept the machine awake while something is playing or recording, and did nothing at all about the quiet stretch beforehand – which is exactly when a machine with nothing to do decides to sleep.

Three answers now, meant to work together. It says so: the scheduling window states the requirement in a line, before you set anything, because a requirement you only discover by losing the first three minutes of a game is not a requirement, it is a trap. It holds sleep off as the time approaches. And it can wake the machine, through a Windows task registered a couple of minutes before the recording – because no amount of asking from inside a sleeping process will help.

Both automatic parts are separate checkboxes, both on by default, and separate deliberately: holding sleep off is a small local thing, while waking the machine changes how your computer behaves.

Winamp’s keys, in the Recordings player

If you came to Windows audio through Winamp, its classic-skin keys never really left your fingers. Until now the Recordings window answered to exactly two of them. The whole transport set is now there, on the letter keys you already know, with no modifier: X play, C pause, V stop, B next, Z previous, R shuffle, S repeat, T elapsed or remaining, J jump to a recording by name, Ctrl+J jump to a time.

Two places it parts company with Winamp, both the better answer here. Ctrl+T stays What’s Playing, because in a radio app knowing what is on the air is worth more than an elapsed-time toggle; the toggle is on plain T. And Up and Down still move through the list, because the recordings list is a playlist editor by any other name.

Shuffle is a fixed reorder rather than a fresh roll each time, so every recording plays exactly once before any repeats and Z is the exact inverse of B. If you would rather have the letters for list typeahead, a preference turns them off.

How Quill Radio reaches you now

Quill Radio, QUILL, Quill Weather and QUILL Audio Studio now share one Python engine – the QuillVille Runtime – installed once per user and reused by every app in the family. Install any one of them and every app you add afterwards starts instantly. The runtime is reference-counted, so it is removed only when the last app relying on it is uninstalled.

That unlocks two much smaller ways to get Quill Radio:

Whenever the runtime is downloaded, the progress bar works with NVDA, JAWS and Narrator, announcing progress as a percentage the whole way.

And updating gives you back the edition you installed. If you have ever chosen Check for Updates and been handed the portable zip when you installed Quill Radio properly, this is the release where that stops. Each installer now writes down which edition it is, and an update offers that same edition back.

Friendlier to antivirus. The launcher is a genuine, tiny native program and the Python it runs is the official, unmodified build – the renamed-and-modified pythonw.exe pattern that some antivirus tools flagged is completely gone. And as of 3.0, releases are code-signed: the installers, the uninstallers and the app itself carry a genuine Authenticode signature.

A global hotkey, and a family menu. Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R from inside any program tucks Quill Radio into the tray or brings it back, without stopping the music. If another app has already claimed that chord, Quill Radio leaves it alone rather than fighting for it. And the QuillVille menu (Alt+Q) lists every app in the family from inside any of them.

Weather moved out. The weather work that grew up in this release now lives in Quill Weather, a small tray-resident app of its own that watches your location for official alerts. Quill Radio has no Weather menu at all anymore – one watcher, not two, and the radio opens talking about radio. What stays is the radio part of weather: the Weather / NOAA branch, every NOAA Weather Radio transmitter with an internet feed, searchable by call sign, SAME code or “County, ST”.

An icon of its own. Quill Radio’s icon was never the problem. The problem was that it was also Quill Inkwell’s, Quill Weather’s and QUILL Audio Studio’s – byte-identical copies of one file, so four products wore one face in the taskbar. Every app has its own now, still recognisably a set, separated by silhouette and by a colour that differs in lightness as well as hue – because a set separated only by hue is a set some colour-blind users cannot tell apart.

And your whole setup can follow you between computers. Preferences > Data Folder… points the shared Quill data folder at something Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive or iCloud already syncs. There is no Quill account, no API and nothing new talking to the network: Quill writes to the folder and the sync client you already run does the carrying.

A podcast you can look at before you decide

There is a new branch in Browse Stations called Podcast Index, and it does the one thing no podcast surface in this app could do before: it lets you look at a show without subscribing to it.

That sounds small. It is not. Until now, a show was a name and a description, and the only way to find out what it actually published – how long the episodes are, how often they come, whether the last one was three years ago – was to subscribe, go to your subscriptions, and read the list. You had to commit in order to ask a question. If the answer was no, you unsubscribed and the show left a mark in your library on the way out.

Open a show in this branch and its episodes are simply there. Arrow through them. Press Enter on one and it plays. Add it to Favorites, download it, read its transcript – they are ordinary rows, and everything that works anywhere else in the tree works here. Then subscribe, if you want to. Or do not, and nothing was spent.

The rows say what they are before you open them. A show tells you who makes it, how many episodes it has, and what it is about. It also tells you, plainly, when the index can no longer read the feed – which is exactly the thing you want to know before subscribing to a show that will never publish again, and exactly the thing a store listing will never say.

Three ways in:

• Trending Now – what people are actually listening to today. Nothing else in the tree could answer that for podcasts.
• By Category – the index’s own hundred and twelve categories, each one a trending list narrowed down.
• Search the Podcast Index… – answered inside the tree, like every other search here, so finding a show does not take the tree away from you.

Searching for a podcast now asks both directories. Search for a Podcast, and Find Stations, ask Apple and the Podcast Index, and merge what comes back. The index is where the independent, the self-hosted and the de-listed shows live – the ones a store does not carry. If one directory cannot answer, the other’s results still arrive and the status line says which one was quiet.

Subscribing from an index row is instant. Its rows carry the feed address itself, where a store row carries an id that has to be looked up first, so Subscribe files the show into the library you share with QUILL Cast – artwork, site and all – with nothing further to fetch.

Nothing was asked of you to switch this on. Quill Radio carries its own credential for the Podcast Index, so there is no key to register for, no account to make, and no settings page you needed to find. The credential identifies the app to a directory of public information: it reads no account, it authorises nothing on your behalf, and a search sends the words you typed and nothing else – not who you are, not what you are subscribed to, not what you have played. If you would rather use a key of your own, you can, and it takes precedence.

And nothing depends on it. Turn the branch off in Choose Browse Sources and podcasts work exactly as they did; Apple remains the keyless default everywhere it was before. The Podcast Index is credited in Help > About – it is an open, independent project that exists to keep podcasting open, and this app is a guest there.

Radio and Cast: two apps, one library

Quill Radio plays podcasts now, and QUILL Cast is an entire podcast application. That sounds like duplication and it is not, so here is the line between them, plainly.

Quill Radio is the app for finding things. Sixty-two thousand stations, thirty branches, live broadcast, recording on a schedule, YouTube, your own Icecast box. Its podcast support is deliberately the lite half: walk Apple’s entire directory with no key and no account, subscribe, play, read a transcript, keep the newest twenty-five episodes of a show in view. That episode count is the only podcast preference Quill Radio has, and that is a decision rather than an omission.

QUILL Cast is the app for following things. It is where the twenty-fifth podcast you subscribe to stops being a pleasure and starts being a filing problem, and it answers exactly that: an Inbox where new episodes wait to be sorted with per-show filing memory, a Play Queue you can reorder from the keyboard, an acquisition policy that keeps the newest one, three, five or ten episodes of each show downloaded and ready without your asking, storage management that shows what your library costs per show and frees space on request, queue expiration so an episode that waited too long leaves quietly and stays restorable for a week, listening statistics with a retention window and CSV export, Quick Actions where you decide what Enter does per content type, and private feeds – a Patreon-style supporter feed signs in per show, with the password in Windows Credential Manager and never in an exported OPML file.

And they are one library, not two. Subscribe in Radio and the show is simply there the next time Cast opens, artwork and site link included. Listen to half an episode over lunch in Radio and Cast knows your real place at its next launch: the episode stops presenting as brand new in the Inbox, and Continue Listening picks up where you actually stopped. Neither app ever writes the other’s files – a small handoff record carries the news – so nothing can be lost whichever one happens to be open.

The reason there are two apps at all is the reason this section exists: you should not have to load a podcast environment to hear a radio station, and you should not have to load a station directory to hear your shows. Install whichever one matches what you came to do, and the other costs you about three megabytes when you want it, because they already share their engine.

What comes next

Nothing below is a promise with a date on it. It is what is being built, so that “not mentioned” and “not coming” do not look the same here either.

In Cast, the work is already written and waiting on its next release. The largest piece is About This Episode, which reads the rest of what a podcast feed publishes and Cast was throwing away: who is on the episode and who makes the show, the moments the podcast itself marked as worth hearing, a live stream if the show is on the air right now, a smaller version of the same episode for a metered connection, the podcasts this show recommends – where subscribing is a real subscribe – and where to support the show. A tab exists only when it has something in it, and the command speaks a one-line summary before the window even opens, so if all you wanted was to know whether there was anything, you never have to open it.

Alongside it: chapters for episodes that never published any, named by what each section is actually about rather than by its first few words, with every chapter carrying where it came from and how confident that was, so an inferred list is a claim you can inspect rather than one you take on faith. An Inbox that can work the other way round – every show except the ones you exclude, which is the mode people with a hundred subscriptions actually want. Hold Shift+Right to scan forward at four times speed and release back to exactly the speed you were at. And an OPML file that opens by double-clicking it, because a subscription list handed over from another app should not need a file picker inside a dialog inside a menu.

In Quill Radio, the next milestone is one piece of work rather than four. Three more station catalogs – FMSTREAM’s international directory, and the SHOUTcast and Icecast webcaster directories – plus RadioDNS, the broadcast-radio standard that carries a station’s real name, identifiers and logo, all landing behind one canonical station record.

That last part is the whole point, and it is why these are not four separate features. Add three directories to a browse tree and the same station arrives three times under three slightly different names, and a listener gets to guess which row plays. RadioDNS is what reconciles them, so one station is one row with its provenance attached. Shipping any catalog before the reconciler would have produced precisely the duplicate problem the reconciler exists to solve, which is why the milestone is not finished until all of it lands together.

After that, in rough order: deeper NOAA Weather Radio and NWS directory work, a RepeaterBook partnership for amateur-radio metadata, a prototype for public SDR receivers you can listen through, and a submission directory for radio-reading services, which is the one on the list this project considers mission-critical rather than merely valuable.

Part Three: When something goes wrong, or you change your mind

Everything above is about what the app can do. This part is about the moments it used to handle badly – and none of them are features anybody goes looking for. Each is something Quill Radio owed you and was quietly not paying.

You can take it back

Press Ctrl+Z.

Unsubscribe, Remove All Downloads, Delete Recording, Mark All as Played – the last one comes back, and the app says what came back: “Undid Unsubscribe. Brought back The Daily, with 412 episodes and 3 downloaded files.”

The alternative, and the thing this deliberately is not, was asking you first every single time. A confirmation prompt costs a keystroke and a sentence on every one of the nine hundred occasions you meant it, and it still cannot help you on the one occasion that matters – because on that occasion you read the question, thought about a different row, and pressed Yes. The prompt was never protecting you from a slip of the finger; it was protecting you from a slip of attention, which is exactly the thing it cannot see.

Three things worth knowing.

It is one step, not a stack. Press Ctrl+Z twice and the second press says “Nothing to undo” rather than quietly rewinding something older that you had forgotten about. If you have to count how many times to press it, you have been handed a puzzle rather than an undo.

Deleted files genuinely come back. A file Quill Radio deletes on your behalf is moved aside rather than unlinked, so undoing a Delete Recording restores the recording itself and not merely its name in a list. What was held is released for good when you do the next destructive thing – which is precisely what makes a single step safe to offer without asking first.

It tells you what it cannot bring back. Unsubscribing from a private feed deletes the password stored for it, deliberately, so no orphaned secret is left behind. The undo restores the subscription and says the password has to be entered again. That sentence is in the offer, not in a support email.

Every action that can be undone ends its own announcement with “Ctrl+Z undoes this”, so you never have to remember which ones were on the list.

Recent Problems

Help > Recent Problems… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+P).

Quill Radio talks. A feed fails, a download dies, a stream drops and cannot be reconnected, and it tells you – once, at the moment it happens. That is right almost always, and completely wrong the one time the sentence went past while you were in another window, or asleep, or making tea.

This was the one place this app was not built the way the rest of it is. Somebody who can see the screen still has a list to scroll back through. Somebody listening had nothing at all: the announcement had been made, so as far as the app was concerned the job was done.

Now every failure worth a second look is written down as well as spoken: what failed, why, and when, newest first. Retry tries the highlighted row again – plays the station, re-queues the download. Copy All takes the list as text, which is the thing to paste into a bug report; it carries addresses and error messages, never passwords. Clear List empties it, and does not fix anything or stop the same problem being recorded again next time.

A feed that has failed on each of the last six checks reads as one row with a fresh time rather than six identical rows, so a feed checked every fifteen minutes cannot bury everything else. A different reason gets its own row, because “404 Not Found” and “timed out” are not the same news.

Nothing in this list leaves your computer.

Quiet hours

Help > Quiet Hours… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Z). 22:00 to 07:00 by default, and a window may cross midnight.

Inside it, Quill Radio stops speaking on its own: the heartbeat of a feed check, the announcement that new episodes arrived.

Three things it does not mean, all of which the window says out loud, because the name invites exactly these misreadings:

• Nothing stops happening. Feeds are still checked. Downloads still run. Recordings still record. Only the announcements wait.
• Anything you press a key for still answers. Press Play at three in the morning and you hear what is playing. Quiet hours never silence a reply to something you asked for – they hold back only the speech nobody asked for. That is not a detail of the implementation, it is the line the whole feature is built around, and it is why every announcement had to opt in by name rather than everything being switched off at a single point.
• Failures always speak. A recording that stopped at 3 a.m. is precisely what somebody sets an alarm-clock radio for.

One override, for the one thing people legitimately want through a quiet window: reminders can be let through anyway.

The window is shared with QUILL Cast and the rest of the family, so you set it once.

Move your setup to another machine

Help > Export My Setup… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+X) writes one file. Help > Import My Setup… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+N) reads it on the other machine.

Inside it: your favorite stations and the folders you filed them into, your saved places, your settings, your Go To list in the order you put it, your own streaming servers, your scheduled recordings, your recording settings, your YouTube rows and channels, your bookmarks, and any keys you rebound.

An OPML export has always moved your podcast subscriptions and nothing else – which is to say it moved the part that was easy to standardise and left behind the part you had actually built.

The file is an ordinary ZIP with a readable manifest, deliberately: you should be able to see what you are carrying, and somebody who no longer runs this software should still be able to get their subscription list out of it. It carries a declared list of files rather than whatever happens to be in the data folder, because a sweep of a folder eventually carries a cache, a lock file, or a credential nobody meant to move.

Passwords are not in it. Private-feed sign-ins, server credentials and unlock codes stay on the machine that holds them. The confirmation says so before it does anything, rather than leaving you to find out when a feed stops working.

Importing replaces what is on the other machine rather than merging with it, and says so first. Merging two libraries is a different job with different questions, and pretending this one does it would be the expensive kind of kindness.

Your place follows you into QUILL Cast, and back

Both apps can play the same subscribed episode. Until now, half an episode heard here reached Cast at Cast’s next launch – the one moment you are least likely to be mid-episode – and nothing came back the other way at all.

They now share one place per episode on this computer, written when you pause as well as when you stop. Quill Radio never wrote a position on pause at all, so what it reported was always from whenever you had last pressed Stop.

Open an episode you were part-way through in the other app and it picks up where you left off, and says so: “Picking up where you left off in QUILL Cast, at 1 hour 2 minutes 3 seconds.” Resuming where you left off in this app stays silent, because that is ordinary and does not need narrating; it is the cross-app jump that is surprising, and a jump nobody explained is indistinguishable from a bug.

The later decision wins, not the furthest through the episode. If you skipped to the outro to check something and then went back to the middle, the middle is where you are. An app that dragged you forward again on the grounds that it was further in would be overruling you with arithmetic.

Skip Silence, and a speed that sticks

Two things the playback engine could always do, and Quill Radio never offered outside podcasts.

Skip Silence (Playback > Skip Silence, Ctrl+Shift+9) shortens the long pauses in a recording, a YouTube row or a podcast episode as it plays. It takes effect on what is already playing, with no interruption and without losing your place. On live radio it says plainly that it will do nothing – a broadcast plays at broadcast speed and its pauses have already gone out – rather than appearing to work and not working.

Play Faster is remembered. A speed chosen during a recording applies to recordings; one chosen on a YouTube row applies to YouTube rows. Per kind rather than per row, because what somebody means by “1.5x for recordings” is every recording, and asking them to set it again for each captured hour would be the same feature with the cost moved onto them.

Smaller things that were quietly wrong

A dimmed menu item now tells you why. Quill Radio dims a great deal on purpose – Mark All as Played with nothing unheard is a state of a verb that row genuinely owns, and an item that vanished would read as the feature coming and going. But a screen reader says “dimmed” and stops. Each now carries its reason: “Remove All Downloads: nothing is downloaded for this show.” The command palette says it too, instead of a bare “(unavailable)”.

Add to Favorites stopped lying. The favorites store answered the same thing whether or not it had added anything, so adding a station you already had announced “Added WQXR to Favorites” over nothing happening. It now says you already have it – and moves the cursor to the one you have, which is the question you were actually asking, since the reason anybody adds a thing twice is that they could not find the first one.

Download All counts. It queued the lot and said whatever the queue said next, so a folder of forty chapters with thirty-nine already on disk reported the same thing as a folder of forty new ones. It now says how many were eligible, how many started and how many it skipped – which required teaching it, for the first time, how to tell whether a row was already here.

Find in this folder searches descriptions. Ctrl+F matched a row’s name only. On a podcast show’s branch that is episode search, and a show that numbers its episodes and puts the subject in its show notes – most interview podcasts – was a show you could not search at all.

Part Four: Three more directories, and the day they were tested

Added late in 3.0, after the notes above were written – which is why they read as a separate chapter rather than being folded through the rest.

Three new places to find a station

Quill Radio already browsed more of the internet’s radio than anything else built for a screen reader. What it did not have was the largest index of small, independent broadcasters anywhere, the second-largest, or a proper connection to one of the few stations that publishes lossless audio. It has all three now, and none of them needs a key, an account, or a registration.

SHOUTcast

Quill Radio has understood a SHOUTcast server for years — it reads their status pages to tell you what is playing. It has never had SHOUTcast’s directory, which is a different and much larger thing: tens of thousands of stations, most of them run by people rather than companies.

It arrives as one branch with two ways in.

Top 500 (most listeners right now) is pinned at the top of it, and it is the closest thing in this app to what is the internet actually listening to at this moment. Not votes cast over years. Not a chart somebody curated last spring. The 500 stations with the most people listening to them right now, most first.

Then 313 genres, from Adult Contemporary to Zouk. Two things are worth knowing about them and both are said out loud rather than left to be discovered: SHOUTcast returns at most 500 stations for a genre however many it holds, so a big genre is a good sample rather than the whole thing; and every list arrives sorted by live listeners, because a SHOUTcast genre page is mostly stations nobody is listening to and putting those first would waste your time. In one measurement of a Jazz page, 39 of the 500 had an audience at all.

Each station also carries what it was playing when the list was fetched, which is often the quickest way to tell two similarly-named stations apart — and it is worded so it is never mistaken for live now-playing, which arrives from the stream itself once you press Enter.

Live365

About 5,500 independent stations, arranged A to Z. Quill Radio could already play a Live365 link somebody handed it; it could not find one, because Live365’s station directory needs an account we will not ask you for. Its public sitemap needs nothing at all — the same route this app already uses for iHeart — so that is what this reads: one request a day, every station in it.

Radio Paradise, properly

It used to be a name search against a community directory, which returned whatever a stranger happened to have registered, at whatever bitrate they registered it. It is now the station’s own channel list — The Main Mix, Mellow Mix, RockIt!, The Globe, Beyond, Serenity, KFAT and Radio 2050 — each at every quality it offers. That runs from 32 kbps AAC+ for a phone tether up to lossless FLAC, which nothing else in the tree offers. Every one of those addresses was played before it was written down; Serenity offers only two of the six, so only two are shown, because a row that will not play is worse than a row that is not there.

Live listeners, as a fact of their own

Community votes tell you a station was well-liked, at some point, by people who bothered to vote. They do not tell you it is on the air. Where a directory actually measures its audience, that number now travels with the station and reads in the details panel as “Live listeners: 8,281” — kept deliberately apart from votes, because reading one as the other is how a list fills up with stations that went off the air in 2019.

A tree that tells you when a source is having a bad day

“Could not be reached”, three times, in identical words, reads as three unrelated hiccups. From the second failure in a row a source now says which it is: “It has failed 3 times in a row — the directory itself may be down. You can hide it in Browse Sources.”

Quill Radio will not switch a source off for you. A branch that quietly disappeared would be a worse failure than the outage it was hiding, and directories recover. The tally is forgotten when you close the app.

Search that stops being slow, and says so while it works

(Two passes: the fan-out, then the thing that was actually slow.)

Search All Sources asked sixteen directories through six workers, which meant three waves of the slowest service back to back. Every source is now asked at the same moment.

That was not the whole of it. Two directories — TuneIn and iHeart — need a separate request for each result they find, to turn a listing into an address you can play, and they were making those requests one after another: ten of them end to end for a single TuneIn search. They now go out together, which is the difference between a search that takes ten seconds and one that takes about one. Searching SHOUTcast from the tree now costs a single request, because its rows work out their address when you press Enter on one.

With the slow shapes gone, the ceiling on the whole search came down to eight seconds — after which any straggler is named (“Internet Archive did not answer within 8 seconds”) rather than quietly left out, so a short list never passes itself off as a complete one.

While it runs it now tells you so, after about four seconds and then periodically, because a cross-source search is as slow as the slowest service in it and nothing on screen changes while it happens.

And when you are done with the answer, Delete on the Search Results branch closes it — or Close Search Results on its context menu. It is the one Delete in the tree that asks nothing, because the branch owns nothing: your query is still in the Find box.

The Find box meets you where you are

Standing on Search All Sources… and reaching for the Find box — Ctrl+F, or one Shift+Tab — used to get you “type something to find in this folder”, about a row that is not a folder. Type there now and press Enter and it searches everything for what you typed, with no second prompt to answer. The same is true while you are standing in the results: typing a new query starts a new search.

Everywhere else the Find box is exactly what it was, and filters the branch you are in.

Sorting that reads like a person wrote it

A folder that listed “ACB Media 1, ACB Media 10, ACB Media 2” now lists 1, 2, 3 and on to 10. Numbers inside a name are compared as numbers — in the browse tree, the A-Z groups, the new Live365 directory and your favorites.

Nothing was renamed to achieve it. Padding the stations out to “ACB Media 01” would have been wrong in the details panel, wrong read aloud, wrong in an export and wrong the moment you searched for the name you actually know. The display name belongs to the broadcaster; the ordering belongs to us.

Smaller things, and one confession

• All three new directories are searchable, from Find Stations and from the tree’s Search All Sources, each with its own on/off switch — and a source that is off is never contacted rather than having its results discarded.
• A source you switch on appears immediately. Choosing Browse Sources used to write the setting and leave an open Browse Stations window showing the old list until the app restarted. It now rebuilds as the dialog closes, and says “Browse Stations has been updated.”
• A source added in a new version now reaches people who already made a choice. A stored list of sources cannot name one that did not exist when it was saved, so anybody who had ever opened either chooser would never have seen these three at all. Fixed for browse sources and — for the first time — for search sources.
• Four more playlist shapes are understood when one is handed to Quill Radio: ASF redirectors, saved URL shortcuts from Windows and from Linux desktops, Winamp .b4s, and Windows Media .wpl.
• The confession. SHOUTcast stations did not play at first. What that directory publishes is a playlist holding the real address, not the address itself, and the first version handed the playlist to the player. It was caught the same afternoon on a station with 293 people listening to it. Stations are now resolved the moment you press Enter — one request on the station you chose, rather than five hundred for a page you are only reading — and a station that cannot be resolved is left out rather than offered and then failing.

Television

The biggest addition in this part, and the shortest to explain, because it behaves exactly like everything else. Television (iptv.org) – just above YouTube in Browse Stations – is about 9,300 playable TV channels from the open iptv.org community catalog, browsable by country and by category, and for countries with local broadcasting, by state and city: the United States opens into Nationwide plus fifty-odd states, each carrying its own and its cities’ channels, city named on the row. Search understands television everywhere search exists, and it understands places: a five-digit ZIP code answers with that state’s channels, because 66044 means “TV around Lawrence”, not “channels containing 66044”. Press Enter and the video plays with the captions and audio-track handling every stream already gets.

The honest edges are documented rather than papered over. Channels flagged adult are absent – this is a family of applications, and the catalog carries the flag precisely so a client can make that choice. “Which channels can my antenna receive?” opens antennaweb.org in your browser, because that tool has no public interface and Quill Radio does not scrape. And a TV guide is one file away: drop an XMLTV file named tv_guide.xml into your data folder and every covered channel says what is on now and next – read locally, never fetched, gone the moment you delete it. The channel list refreshes weekly (it is the heaviest catalog in the app) with an update-now action on the branch.

Quillins can bring their own station sources

Until now an installed Quillin could add stations to search results and nothing else. A Quillin that declares the new browse trio – categories, stations, and an optional play-time resolve step – is now a whole source: a Quillin Sources branch appears when one is installed (and is simply absent otherwise), its stations play and favourite like any built-in source, and a row may carry an opaque key instead of an address, resolved only at the moment of playback, so a stream a provider must not cache never lands in a favourites file or an export. Any network a provider uses runs through the Quillin host’s hardened fetch, bounded by the allowlist its own manifest declares. The bundled Radio Community Directory sample demonstrates the whole shape.

The Station menu, wherever you are standing

Quill Radio’s windows are peers, and until now each one’s menu bar held exactly two menus: its own, and Window. So Alt+S – the Station menu – worked in the main window and nowhere else, which is a strange rule to have to learn and an impossible one to discover. It was reported twice in one day, which is how you know it is the model and not a missing item.

Every radio window now carries a Station menu too: Browse Stations, Search Stations, Manage Favorites, Recordings, and Preferences, each showing the key you actually have bound, each running the exact same code the main window runs. A window never lists itself, and never takes a key its own controls already use – inside Browse Stations, Ctrl+F still goes to the Find box.

Search, the fourth pass: instant repeats and a warm start

Three passes made the search concurrent, resolved results in parallel, and put local answers on screen in under a second. Two costs remained, and both are now gone. Searching the same thing twice – checking whether a station came back, re-finding the row you closed – used to pay for the whole fan-out again; the finished answer is now remembered for ten minutes and renders instantly, while a fresh search runs quietly behind it and takes its place. And the first search of a run used to pay to fill the very caches it answers from; opening Browse Stations now fills them in the background before you have typed anything. A source you switched off is never contacted – not even by the warm-up – and Safe Mode skips it entirely.

Sources with opinions of their own

Two of the new directories took an option, and the way they took it matters more than the options. Source Options… on a source’s context menu asks Radio Paradise which quality Enter should land on (from 32 kbps for a phone tether to lossless FLAC – nothing is hidden, the rest stay one arrow key away), and asks SHOUTcast whether to list everything or only stations with listeners right now. Under it is a declaration system: a source states its options as data and the app renders them with the platform’s own dialogs, so the next source that wants a setting writes a tuple, not a dialog, and a screen reader meets a control it already knows.

Alt+S, the real story

Adding the Station menu to every window turned out to be half the fix. The other half was stranger: a label was stealing the key. The browse tree’s caption – “&Stations (expand a source to browse it):” – claimed Alt+S, and on Windows a control label’s mnemonic silently outranks the menu bar’s, so Alt+S moved focus to the tree and the menu never opened. Once found, the class turned out to be everywhere: seventeen labels across seven windows were disarming the very menus their own windows carry – the Recordings window’s list label ate its own Recordings menu. Every label has moved to a free letter (the browse tree is now Alt+T, which is the fair trade: Alt+T jumps to the tree, Alt+S opens Station), and a new test forbids any label from claiming a letter its window’s menu bar owns, so the class is closed, not just the cases.

Every app, every menu item, a key

The rule that every enabled menu item shows its keyboard route has been enforced for Quill Radio since 3.0 – by a gate that, it turns out, only ever walked Quill Radio. A family-wide sweep found 116 menu-bar items with no accelerator: 46 in QUILL Cast, 30 in Audio Studio, 18 in Media Player, ten each in Inkwell and Weather, six in Converter. Every one now carries a unique key, chosen against each app’s existing claims, and a family-wide gate keeps the next app honest. Search also got quicker at iHeart specifically: it now uses iHeart’s own relevance search – two requests, ranked results, streams included – instead of filtering a downloaded index and fetching a page per match.

Two menus that never opened

Quillins asked for Alt+Q. So did QuillVille, sitting beside it on the same bar. Only one of them can have it, so one of them silently did nothing – for as long as both have been there. Quillins is Alt+N now. (QUILL Audio Studio had the same fault: Voices and View both asked for Alt+V. Voices is Alt+I.)

Quill Radio has checked since 3.0 that every item in a menu shows a key and that no two items share one. It had never checked the menus themselves, which is the rung you need first: a menu you cannot open is a menu whose items’ keys do not matter. That check now exists for every menu bar in the family, so neither fault can come back.

And the menus are now on the Keyboard Shortcuts Sheet (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K), at the top, with the key that opens each one — read off the bar in front of you, so it is right in whichever window you are standing in.

Where each window’s menu is

Quill Radio’s windows are peers, not dialogs, and each carries its own single menu — so the letter that opens one depends on where you are standing. Alt+S is Station in the main window, Search in Find Stations, and nothing at all in Browse Stations, which is Alt+B. Every one of them is now listed in the Keyboard Shortcuts Sheet (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K) under the window it works in, and in the user guide.

The rest

Two things the ACB schedule was getting wrong

Both were found on 2026-08-24 by reading the live feed rather than by a test, and both are the kind that do not announce themselves.

Every programme was five hours early. ACB writes its calendar in US Central time and says so in the feed; Quill Radio read those times as though they were UTC and then converted them to your clock. Everything moved by the same amount, so the schedule still looked like a schedule – there was nothing on screen to compare it against. Times are now read in the zone they were written in. If you had learned to mentally add five hours, you can stop.

A repeating programme could vanish. ACB published their first genuinely recurring entry this month, and its repeat rule ends before the event it is attached to. Read strictly, that produces no occurrences at all and the programme simply is not in the schedule – no error, no gap, nothing to notice. The first occurrence is now always shown, which is what every other calendar does with the same entry. A programme you deliberately cancelled stays cancelled, and a series that genuinely finished months ago stays gone.

The Command Palette key worked in neither app. Ctrl+Shift+P is installed on every window, and it opened nothing anywhere – silently, which is why it went unreported: a key that does nothing is indistinguishable from a key nobody bound. It opens the palette now, from any window.

What is not in 3.0, and why saying so matters

“Not mentioned” and “not built” look identical from the outside, so here is the rest.

Live streams still have no transcript. The reader works on a finished video’s captions and on a published transcript, both of which exist as a document before you open them. A live broadcast has no such document.

Quill Radio itself has no sync setup for playback positions. Where you got to in a recording is remembered on the computer you were using. The Data Folder above carries your settings and favorites between machines; the full QUILL application can carry playback positions too.

Adding a YouTube playlist is an import, not a subscription or a play queue. The videos become ordinary favorites. Nothing plays through them in order and nothing re-checks the playlist later – run the command again to collect what was added since, and anything already in your favorites is skipped rather than duplicated.

None of this is blocked; it is listed because you should not have to guess.

Part Five: The app teaches itself

There is one more thing in 3.0, and it is the one that changes what the app is for somebody on their first day.

Help > Tutorials… (Ctrl+Alt+F1) opens 36 guided tutorials – 251 steps, six tracks, about three and a half hours of material if you worked through every one – covering every feature Quill Radio has, in the order somebody would actually learn it.

They are not a second copy of the user guide. A guide answers “what does this do”. It cannot answer “what do I do now”, because a document cannot see what you have already done. This window can.

You open it from wherever you are stuck

The Tutorials window opens on a contents tree: six tracks, each holding its lessons, each row saying how many steps it has, roughly how long it takes, and whether you have finished it. A filter box sits above it. Type a word and the list narrows – every word you type has to appear somewhere in a tutorial, so “record tuesday” finds the scheduling lesson without your knowing which field holds which word.

And type here and the list narrows to the tutorials about the window you came from. Open Tutorials while standing in Browse Stations and the window says so as it opens – “4 tutorials here are about Browse Stations. Type ‘here’ to see just those.” – because that is a thing only this window knows and the screen reader will never say it for us.

A lesson is one step at a time

Press Enter on a tutorial and you get one step in a read-only field you can arrow through, review a word at a time, and copy from. The step says four things:

• what to do, in a short paragraph that also says why – a tutorial that lists keystrokes is a keyboard reference with extra words, and this app already has one of those;
• the keys, on their own line;
• what you should hear when it worked, which is how a screen-reader user checks a step rather than looking for a green tick;
• and, where there is one, the thing worth knowing – the setting that changes it, the mistake everybody makes once, the reason it is like that.

The keys are your keys

A step does not carry a key in its text. It names the command it is about, and the key is rendered at the moment the step is drawn, from your own keymap. Rebind Browse Stations in the Keyboard Manager and every tutorial that mentions it says your key from then on.

This is the same rule that governs the Keyboard Shortcuts Sheet, and for the same reason: a second list of keys, maintained beside the first, is a list that is wrong by the next release. The tutorials cannot go stale about keys because they never knew any.

Try it does the step

Any step that names a command carries a Try it button, and it runs exactly what the key would have run. So a lesson can open Browse Stations for you and then talk you through what you are now standing in – which is a different experience from a document telling you to go and open something.

Where a step is about arrowing a tree or pressing Escape, there is no command to run and the button is dimmed. Nothing pretends.

Follow me is the part worth the whole feature

Tick Follow me (it is on to begin with) and the lesson watches the app while you work. Once a second it asks a question the step declared – is something playing? did your favorites grow? is Browse Stations open? – and when the answer changes it says what it noticed and reads you the next step:

Done: something is playing now.

Play your first station – step 6 of 8: Set the volume without leaving the tree…

Four things about that, each of them deliberate:

• It watches state, not keystrokes. Pressing the key, using the menu, pressing the status bar’s Play cell, or asking the Command Palette all count equally, because all four did the thing. A watcher that waited for one route would be teaching the route rather than the thing.
• It compares against where you started. “Add a favorite” is satisfied by your favorites growing by one, not by your having forty already – otherwise the step would either pass instantly for an established listener or never pass at all.
• It never guesses. Anything it cannot read answers “cannot tell”, which the window treats exactly like a step with no check on it.
• It is a courtesy, not a gate. Nothing is graded, nothing is blocked, there is no score and no streak, and every step still has Next. A check that never comes true costs you one keypress.

It is a window, not a wizard

The Tutorials window is a peer window, like Browse Stations and the Player. It stands in the taskbar, in the Window menu, and in the Ctrl+Tab rotation. So the way a lesson is meant to be used is: leave it open, Ctrl+Tab into the app, do the step there, and hear the lesson move on behind you.

A modal wizard could not do that. It would own the keyboard for the whole lesson, which is precisely the wrong shape for teaching somebody to use the thing underneath it.

Your place is kept

Close a lesson half way through and it opens there again. Finishing one is remembered separately from where you are in it, so re-reading something you have done does not throw away the fact that you did it. The contents rows say which is which – “finished”, or “you stopped at step 4”.

Forget my progress clears the lot, asks first, and changes nothing else. There is no percentage anywhere and no completion badge: nobody opened a radio app to be scored. Nothing about your progress leaves this computer.

Reading, rather than doing

Read it all shows a whole tutorial as one page of text, for when you would rather read than be walked. And The whole book as a document opens all 36 tutorials as one page in your browser, for reading straight through or printing – generated from the same lessons the window teaches from, so the two cannot disagree. It ships as tutorials in this same docs folder. (The document states the keys Quill Radio ships with. Only the window can know the ones you rebound.)

What is in the 36

The tracks are not categories. Each is a claim about what you can do by the end of it.

Your first hour (5 tutorials, ~23 minutes) – play your first station; keep it and find it tomorrow; the player follows you; do anything by name; getting unstuck. Somebody who works straight down this track finishes with a station playing, a favorite under a name they chose, the transport keys in their fingers, and four separate ways out of anywhere they get stuck.

Finding something to listen to (6, ~38 minutes) – wandering the browse tree; searching every directory at once; the field-based search and its recents; stations no directory lists (a pasted stream, a scanned website, a whole Icecast server, an imported playlist); the catalog on your own disk and why browsing works on a train; and what to do when a station will not play.

Making it yours (6, ~36 minutes) – folders and an order of your own; the ten quick-play slots and what the main window shows; deciding what a row says and what Enter does (Choose Columns and Quick Actions, both of which are speech settings wearing a list setting’s clothes); making the keys yours, including system-wide hotkeys; the six settings actually worth changing; and Quillins.

Recording (5, ~33 minutes) – record what is on now; book a show that has not started yet, including the time-zone trap and the “Add Schedule is the last button, not the first” rule; several stations at once and lossless raw capture; living in the Recordings list with its dozen Winamp keys; and what happens when a recording breaks – part files, stitching, stalls, crash-resume, and which failures are worth retrying.

More than radio (8, ~54 minutes) – following a podcast and where the line with QUILL Cast falls; audiobooks, archives and free music, including exactly what each source will and will not let you keep; YouTube with no account anywhere, and its honest limits; television and your own XMLTV guide; the ACB Media schedule, reminders and Upcoming; NOAA Weather Radio; Community Picks and suggesting one; and Spotify, with the free-versus-Premium question answered before you spend ten minutes on setup.

Living with it (6, ~36 minutes) – what was that song; keeping a moment and moving by chapter; sleeping, waking, quiet hours and reminders; how much you actually listened; shaping the sound (per-station volume, boost, EQ, pausing live radio, a speed that sticks); and backing it up, moving it, updating it, and what to do on the day something is genuinely wrong.

One key moved to make room

Product Requirements… moved from Ctrl+Alt+F1 to Alt+Shift+F1. The F1 family – F1 for the control you are on, Ctrl+F1 for the guide, Shift+F1 and Ctrl+Shift+F1 for these notes and their companion, Alt+F1 for About – is ordered by how often somebody reaches for a door. A new listener reaches for a tutorial far more often than anybody reaches for the product requirements, so the tutorials take the shorter chord and the PRD moves out one notch. (The obvious next chord along, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F1, was not available: it belongs to a QuillVille app launcher.)

If you had the old key in your fingers, that is the one thing here that will surprise you.

What it costs

Nothing at runtime. The lessons are ordinary data compiled into the app, the watcher is one timer that reads a handful of values while a lesson is open, and the whole feature is inert when the window is shut.

Compatibility

Nothing in this release changes where your favorites, history, recordings or settings are stored, and nothing needs migrating. Every new branch can be ignored entirely; if you never open Browse Stations, Quill Radio 3.0 behaves exactly as the version you are coming from did, minus the faults above.

Safe Mode continues to disable every network source and to say so per branch, while Favorites, ACB Media, NFB Radio and the Networks catalogue keep working offline as before.

The long version

Quite a lot of 3.0 has a story underneath it – why the YouTube described-audio tracks took a second request to reach, why two Explore axes were removed rather than shipped, why a folder full of Xiph genres was a different size on every refresh, and how the whole browse tree was rebuilt so that the next source costs an afternoon rather than a fortnight.

All of it is in release-notes-3.0-in-depth, which ships in this same docs folder. Nothing in it is required reading. It is there because the reasoning behind a decision is worth as much as the decision, and because “we fixed some bugs” is not a sentence this project wants to write.

Where the notes for 2.0 and 2.1 live

The 2.0 and 2.1 releases – recordings you can trust, iHeart and TuneIn in the search, weather radio and radio reading services – have their own document, release-notes-2.0, which ships in the docs folder beside this one.