Quill Radio 2.0 -- Release Notes

Quill Radio 2.0 is about one thing done thoroughly: recordings you can trust. Version 1.1.0 rebuilt the sound -- a new playback engine, every stream format, live rewind, richer Sound Enhancements. 2.0 turns that same care on the recorder, closing a reported round of recording bugs and adding the one piece that was always missing: a recording that survives a restart. If you schedule shows, leave long recordings running unattended, or have ever come back to find a capture cut short or gone entirely, this release is for you.

It also widens the net for finding stations: iHeart and TuneIn now join the search, so two of the biggest directories on the internet are searchable and playable right inside Browse Stations. More on that below.

As always, everything below also lands in QUILL itself. Quill Radio and QUILL share one codebase and one data store, so these fixes arrive in both at once -- nothing here is vendored into the Quill Radio wrapper.

Update 2.2.0

Quill Radio 2.2.0 collects everything since 2.1.2 -- a round of fixes and small conveniences straight from your testing, and a piece many of you have asked for: a proper backup you can carry to a new device.

• The menu bar stays put, and windows work the way you expect. Until now, opening Browse Stations, Search Stations, Manage Favorites, Schedule Recording, or the Weather Center could make the menu bar seem to vanish -- because those surfaces were dialogs, and a dialog cannot carry a menu bar -- and the modal ones shut you out of the main window entirely. They are now proper windows: each carries the full menu bar (so the menus are always one Alt away, wherever you are), and they no longer lock the main window. You can keep more than one open at a time. A new Window menu lists every open window, numbered in the order you opened them, and you move between them with Ctrl+Tab (next) and Ctrl+Shift+Tab (previous), or jump straight to one with Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+9 -- the same window keys you already know from other apps. Each window opens only when you ask for it, and closing one puts you back in the window you came from, announced as you arrive. This started from a report that the menu bar disappeared in certain screens; the fix was to change how the screens themselves work.
• Back up and restore -- take your radio with you. Two new items on the Station menu, Back Up Stations and Settings... and Restore from Backup..., save your favorites, settings, wake timer, and recording schedule -- and, if you want, your recorded audio -- into a single .qrbackup file. Copy it to a new PC (or your new BrailleNote), restore, and everything is back. Made for exactly the moment you switch machines or reinstall Windows.
• Favorites keep a rolling backup, automatically. Every change to your favorites now snapshots the previous version aside (the last 20 are kept), so a bad edit or an accidental delete can be recovered.
• Ctrl+T shows the now-playing text, not just speaks it. "What's Playing?" now opens a small window with the current title and artist you can arrow through character by character and copy -- to note a song's spelling or paste it into a search. It still speaks the title, and falls back to speaking when a stream hasn't sent its track info yet. The window was mentioned in the notes but nothing actually opened it; now Ctrl+T does.
• Details for any favorite. Bring up a favorite's context menu (Applications key or Shift+F10) and choose Station Details... for the same reviewable readout the search results give -- source, stream, format, country.
• Moving favorites up and down never scrambles a list you arranged by hand. From a sorted A-Z/Z-A view, Alt+Shift+Up/Down switches to manual order -- showing you your saved order (Quill Radio says "Switched to manual order") -- and moves the station within it. It no longer replaces your stored order with the alphabetical view first, which could silently wipe out a carefully hand-arranged list you had no way to recover. Your order is kept; only the sort setting changes.
• Move a favorite in one step with Mark and Move. Instead of nudging a station up or down thirty times, open a favorite's context menu (Applications key or Shift+F10) and choose Mark for Move; then go to wherever you want it, open the menu again, and pick Move Marked Above or Move Marked Below. The marked station jumps straight there (adopting that spot's folder). It works on the main favorites list and in the Favorites Manager.
• Exit means exit. If you set Radio to minimize to the tray on close, choosing Exit -- even from the tray menu -- used to just hide it again, with no way to quit short of a reboot. Exit now genuinely closes the app.
• The menus are there the moment you open the app. Pressing Alt right after launch used to bring up the window's own Minimize/Maximize menu instead of Radio's menu bar. Focus now lands inside the window immediately, so Alt opens the app menu from the first keystroke.
• NOAA weather states that say "9 stations" now have nine stations. A state under Weather / NOAA could show a count and then expand to nothing; the count and the list were reading from two different places. They read from the same directory now, so what you see is what you get.
• Weather goes worldwide. The Weather menu used to find and forecast only US places. Location search now resolves anywhere in the world, and a non-US location gets a real forecast -- current conditions and up to a 16-day outlook, with air quality -- from the free Open-Meteo service, while US places keep the authoritative National Weather Service report. (Local watches and warnings are still US-only; worldwide reports say so.)
• Browse keeps your place. Expanding a country or genre in Browse Stations no longer jerks your cursor down into the station list; it stays on the folder you opened (you still hear its count), so you move into the list when you choose to.
• "Install and restart" doesn't hang anymore. One-click updating could stall behind a stray, focus-stealing terminal window the updater spawned; it now runs fully hidden and completes.
• "Radio Browser," spelled out -- and browsable by genre. The Search source picker now says Radio Browser in two words (a screen reader could make the old run-together spelling sound like the option was gone), and Browse Stations has a new Radio Browser (by Genre) branch so you can wander that huge directory by genre instead of only searching it.
• A new View menu -- a readable status bar, sort, expand, and text size. A View menu joins the menu bar, gathering several conveniences in one place. Show Station Details turns the read-only details box in Browse and Search Stations on or off -- hide it if you would rather not tab past it, and every station surface honors your choice. Show Status Bar adds a strip along the bottom of the main window that always shows what is going on: what is playing, the volume (and whether Volume Boost is on), whether a recording is running, the sleep timer, how many favorites you have, and the time. Press F6 to land in it, arrow left and right across the cells (Home and End jump to the ends), and press Enter on a cell to act on it -- Enter on Now Playing opens the What's Playing window, Enter on Volume mutes, Enter on Recording starts or stops recording, Enter on the Sleep timer opens the timer. Right-click (or Applications key) any cell for more: play/pause, mute, volume up and down, Volume Boost, stop all recordings. Escape (or a second F6) hands focus straight back to your favorites. The menu also brings Sort Favorites (Ascending, Descending, or Unsorted) up from Preferences, one keystroke away and showing which order you are in; Expand All Folders / Collapse All Folders to open or close your whole favorites tree at once; and Text Size (Normal, Large, or Larger) to make everything on the main window -- the favorites list, the buttons, the now-playing line, and the status bar -- bigger for easier reading. Every toggle and choice here is remembered between sessions.
• The Move buttons in Manage Favorites work from the alphabetical view. In the Manage Favorites window, Move Up, Move Down, Move Above, and Move Below did nothing unless your list was already in manual order -- so from the normal A-Z view they were dead. They now do what the main list does: the first move switches to manual order (revealing your saved order) and moves the station within it, without overwriting your stored order with the alphabetical view -- so a hand-arranged list is never lost.
• Quill Radio keeps your computer awake while it plays. Windows going to sleep in the middle of a long listen -- or worse, during a scheduled recording -- would cut the audio off. Quill Radio now asks Windows to stay awake while a station is playing or a recording is running, so it keeps going. Your screen can still turn off to save power; only the computer's sleep is held off, and only while something is actually playing or recording. It is on by default; a new checkbox in Station > Preferences (Ctrl+,), Keep the computer awake while playing or recording, turns it off if you would rather Quill Radio never touch your power settings.
• The Stop button responds to Alt+S again. The one Stop/Play button was advertising Alt+S (and Alt+P), but those are the shortcuts for the Station and Playback menus, so pressing them opened a menu instead of stopping the radio -- the button never fired. The button no longer claims those clashing shortcuts, and the reliable transport key, Ctrl+P (Play, and Stop while playing), works from anywhere in the window. Handy when a station is louder than your screen reader and you just want silence fast.
• New Folder works with Ctrl+Shift+E from your favorites. The New Folder shortcut was listed but did nothing when your cursor was in the favorites tree; it now works everywhere in the window.
• Add TuneIn stations to your Favorites straight from Browse. TuneIn stations only work out their stream when you play them, so Add to Favorites used to be missing for them in Browse Stations. Now Add to Favorites (from the context menu or the button) fetches the stream and saves the station, just like every other source.
• Adding a custom station shows it in your favorites right away. Adding a custom station saved it but did not refresh the list, so it looked as if nothing had happened. The list now updates immediately.
• Remove all your favorites in one step. The Favorites Manager gains a Remove All... button that clears every favorite at once (your folders stay) after a clear confirmation -- and because favorites keep a rolling backup, you can undo it if you change your mind.
• New stations show up after an in-place update. After updating from an older version, Browse Stations could keep showing the old set of categories and stations because the previous version's directory cache had not expired yet. It now recognizes when the app has shipped a newer directory and uses that, so new categories (like iHeart or Radio Reading Services) appear right after you update -- while a directory you refreshed yourself by hand is still respected.
• The radio really stops when you exit. On the playback engine that powers pausing and rewinding, audio could keep going for a moment after the app closed if it shut down in an unusual order; it is now stopped firmly on exit. (Closing to the tray with Ctrl+W or the X still keeps playing on purpose -- that is what the tray is for; use Exit to quit.)
• Schedule a recording in hours and minutes. Setting how long to record used to be a single minutes box, so a long show meant doing the arithmetic ("180 minutes"). You now set Hours and Minutes separately -- three hours is just "3" and "0". Your existing schedules are unchanged.
• Change the volume with a slider you can Tab to. As well as Ctrl+Up/Down and the status bar, the main window now has a Volume slider right in the Tab order: tab to it while a station is playing and use the arrow keys to turn it up or down. However you change the volume, all three stay in agreement.
• Song titles show up for more stations. A few stations -- some HLS streams and a handful of others another app still shows a song for -- were leaving the now-playing line (and What's Playing / Ctrl+T) blank, because they tuck the current track into the player's metadata rather than its main title field. Quill Radio now reads that too, so the song and artist appear and are spoken where they used to be missing.

Update 2.1.2

Quill Radio 2.1.2 is a quick fix-up for three things you reported -- two of them from 2.1.1 itself. Thank you for the fast, specific feedback; it is exactly what makes these turnarounds possible.

• One-click updating works again. If you chose Install and restart on 2.1.1, it could fail with a "decompression bomb" error and send you off to update by hand. The update installer carries a safety guard against absurdly large archives, sized for documents -- but a whole Quill Radio (Python, ffmpeg, and the mpv engine, all bundled) legitimately unpacks past that limit, so the guard was turning away the real update. It now allows a full app-sized download while still refusing a genuinely abnormal one, so Install and restart applies the update and relaunches, keeping your favorites, recordings, and settings.
• Favorites keep the order you gave them. A few of you updated and found a lovingly hand-sorted list snapped into A-Z on the next launch -- understandably frustrating after sorting thirty-plus stations by hand. The sort-order setting introduced in 2.0.2 was reading an older, orderless favorites file as "Ascending." Quill Radio now reads a pre-2.0.2 file as Unsorted, so your order carries across the upgrade untouched. And if an earlier update already rearranged you, the original order is still there underneath: choose Unsorted in Preferences and it comes right back.
• A shared Speech Hub crash is fixed and regression-locked. Opening Dictation (Offline) in the Speech Hub could crash on an older build; it was already fixed, and it now has a test standing guard so it cannot come back.

Update 2.1.1

Quill Radio 2.1.1 is about weather radio done properly, and about a kind of station that matters enormously to this community and has never been easy to find: the radio reading service.

• NOAA Weather Radio, from an authoritative directory. The Weather / NOAA branch in Browse Stations no longer guesses at stations by searching for a name; it is powered by the WeatherIndex directory of actual NWR transmitters. Open it and you get the states; open a state and you get its real transmitters, each named with its call sign and frequency -- "KHB36 162.550 MHz Manassas" -- and Enter plays the best available internet re-stream. Favorite them, record them, schedule them like any other station.
• Search speaks weather-radio. Type a SAME code (the 6-digit county code your weather-alert radio uses), a call sign, or a "County, ST" into station search and the authoritative directory answers with exact transmitters, blended right into the normal results.
• Your local transmitter, one keypress. Weather menu > Listen to your Local NOAA Weather Radio uses the Weather location you already saved -- its county first, then the nearest covering transmitter by coordinates -- and just plays it. No location set? It tells you how to add one.
• It works offline, and it outlives the API. Every NOAA feature stands on three tiers: the live directory, a cache of the last successful pull, and a complete bundled snapshot -- 1,035 transmitters across every state and territory -- inside the app itself. A machine with no internet still browses, searches, and finds your local transmitter. Weather menu > Update NOAA Weather Radio Directory pulls the newest data whenever you ask; the bundled snapshot is never overwritten, so there is always a floor.
• Radio Reading Services -- the human newspaper. For decades, radio reading services have had volunteers read newspapers, magazines, and grocery ads aloud over closed-circuit radio for people who are blind or print-disabled -- and finding their internet streams has always been word-of-mouth. A new Radio Reading Services branch in Browse Stations gathers them: WRBH 88.3 Reading Radio in New Orleans, Sun Sounds of Arizona, CRIS Radio and the Connecticut Radio Information System, the KPBS and WKAR reading services, ACB Media 1-5, the NFB Radio Network, Voice Corps, and more. 20 vetted services are bundled so the branch is never empty, even offline; they show up in station Search by name, tag, or state; and Station > Update Radio Reading Services refreshes the list on demand from the community RadioBrowser directory. Play them, favorite them, record your evening paper.

Both directories follow the same rules as every other source: live pulls are off in Safe Mode, every network call is in the egress audit, and a bundled snapshot keeps the feature honest when the network is not there.

Two more from live feedback:

• iHeart, now something you can browse. iHeart was searchable but you could not wander it. The Browse Stations tree gains an iHeart branch that opens into genres, and each genre into an A-Z sub-directory, all loading lazily as you open them -- so you can flip to Country, then to the letter K, then play, without typing a thing. (The XML sitemap iHeart search uses carries no genre, so browse quietly uses iHeart's free, keyless content API instead; each station arrives with its stream already attached, so a genre opens in a single request.)
• The Source filter stops hiding SomaFM stations. A SomaFM channel that RadioBrowser also lists was folded into one search result, and picking SomaFM in the Source dropdown could then hide it. Search now remembers every directory a merged station came from, so "Groove Salad" answers to the SomaFM, RadioBrowser, and TuneIn filters alike, while the result row still names the directory it played from.

Update 2.1.0

Quill Radio 2.1.0 adds a top-level Weather menu, a whole new way to browse stations, one-click updating, and a round of fixes from live feedback -- all in the shared quill package, so QUILL gets them too.

• A whole new Weather menu -- official weather as delightful, spoken text. A top-level Weather menu on free, no-account sources: the National Weather Service for conditions, the forecast, and alerts; Open-Meteo for the extended outlook and air quality; and OpenStreetMap for search. Search a location by ZIP code, city, county, or address and pick the right match from a list -- so the several Springfields are easy to tell apart -- then open Weather Now. It reads, as plain arrow-navigable and copyable text:

  • any active watches, warnings, and advisories first, with the full official instructions;
  • a complete, warm paragraph of current conditions -- temperature, feels-like, sky, humidity, dew point, wind and gusts, cloud cover, barometric pressure, visibility, chance of precipitation, sunrise, sunset, the ultraviolet index, and air quality;
  • the National Weather Service forecast, period by period; and
  • an extended daily outlook of up to 16 days (10 by default), further than the Weather Service's own 7-day forecast.

  Every value is written out for speech -- "the wind is blowing from the west-northwest at 5 miles per hour", not "WNW 5 mph" -- and observation times show in the location's own time zone. Each current-conditions detail can be turned on or off in Settings. Manage places with Add Location and Remove Location (or the Delete key). Quick Weather speaks a one-line summary without opening a window, and Active Alerts jumps straight to the alerts. Text only for now -- spoken weather with its own voices comes in a later phase -- and, as the app says, it is an additional accessible tool, never a replacement for a NOAA Weather Radio, Wireless Emergency Alerts, or local emergency instructions.

• A whole new way to browse -- one unified tree of every source. You asked (thanks, Kelly) to be able to pick a source like SomaFM and just see its stations, without typing a search first. So Browse Stations is now its own dedicated, search-free window: a single tree whose branches are the sources. You expand a branch and its stations appear on the spot; press Enter to play the highlighted one, and Shift+F10 (or right-click) opens a full menu -- Play/Stop, Add or Remove Favorite, Copy the stream link, Open the station's website -- with a Refresh to re-pull a source. It reads like a media library you wander, not a form you fill in. Search Stations... stays a separate window with the familiar name/tag/country box. The branches are:

  • Favorites, at the very top -- your own saved folders and streams, built instantly, so you can jump straight to one. Right-click a source folder for Add All Stations to Favorites, and note the Play button reads "Stop" while the highlighted station is playing.
  • Popular Stations -- the most-listened stations on the internet right now (from the community RadioBrowser directory), a great "what's good?" start with nothing to type.
  • Weather / NOAA -- NOAA Weather Radio (NWR) internet re-streams: the actual transmitters, named with their call sign and frequency ("NOAA Weather Radio KHB36 Manassas 162.550 MHz"). NOAA has no audio API of its own (NWR is over-air VHF), so these are the online re-streams listeners share; Quill Radio finds the genuine ones by name.
  • ACB Media and NFB Radio -- the bundled accessibility-community streams, ready to play.
  • SomaFM -- SomaFM's whole channel lineup at once, so you can arrow through every channel instead of guessing a name.
  • TuneIn -- TuneIn's own directory as a real folder tree: Music, Talk, Sports, Local Radio, By Location, By Language, and more. Open a folder to reveal its sub-folders and stations, and press Enter on one to play it.
  • Community M3U (Music Genres) -- a big community catalog sorted by genre (jazz, classical, 80s, country, ambient, and dozens more), fetched live from the public m3u-radio-music-playlists collection by junguler (https://github.com/junguler/m3u-radio-music-playlists) -- with our thanks. Nothing is bundled; the lists are read on the spot.
  • Xiph / Icecast Directory -- the long-running, keyless Icecast "yellow pages" at dir.xiph.org, browsed by genre and refreshable the same on-the-spot way.

• Browsing and searching are now clearly separate. The Station menu splits the two: Browse Stations... opens the unified source tree above, while Search Stations... opens the field-based window with your cursor already in the search box. No more one screen that tried to be both.

• SomaFM search ignores spacing and punctuation too. "GrooveSalad", "groove-salad", or "salad groove" all find "Groove Salad", where before only an exact run of letters matched.

• Reorder your favorites straight from the keyboard. When your favorites are in manual (Unsorted) order, press Alt+Shift+Up or Alt+Shift+Down on the main Favorites list to move the selected station up or down within its folder -- the same gesture you'd use to move an item in Microsoft Teams. Quill Radio speaks where it landed, naming the neighbor: "Moved down, now above WABC." (The Manage Favorites dialog's Move Up / Move Down buttons still do the same thing with the mouse.)

• Update in one click -- Quill Radio installs it and restarts itself. When an update is available, choose Download, then Install and restart now. Quill Radio applies the update for you -- extracting the new portable files over your current folder, or running the installer silently -- and relaunches automatically, keeping every favorite, recording, and setting exactly as it was. No more closing the app, hunting for the zip, unzipping it, and swapping folders by hand. This is shared across every Quill app, so QUILL, QUILL Cast, and Audio Studio update the same easy way.

• Quill Radio no longer opens a second copy of itself. If Quill Radio was already running -- even minimized to the system tray -- launching it again used to start a whole second instance. Now the copy already running simply comes to the front, and the second launch bows out. (#1152)

• The Record button tells you when you are recording. Once a recording begins, the Record button on the main window changes to Stop Recording, and changes back to Record when it stops -- so it is obvious at a glance (and to a screen reader) that a capture is running. (Recording has no pause, so this is a Record/Stop toggle.)

• Volume changes are quiet again with a screen reader. Holding Ctrl+Up or Ctrl+Down on a station you have saved used to speak the station's name -- and sometimes a track title -- on every step, so "turn it up three notches" became a wall of chatter. That was the app re-saving the station's remembered volume by rebuilding the whole favorites list underneath you. It now saves the new level quietly, so you hear just "Radio volume 60", "Radio volume 70". (#1154)

• The Country list in Browse Stations stays put while you arrow through it. Moving to the Country dropdown and pressing Down used to fire a search that immediately threw your focus into the results list -- so you could never actually arrow down the list of countries. A search now jumps to the results only when you ask for one (the Search button, or pressing Enter in a search box); arrowing through Country or Tag just narrows the list and leaves your focus alone.

• The Raw stream recording format no longer shows a bitrate. A raw stream is saved exactly as the station sends it, with no re-encoding, so a "Quality (bitrate)" setting does nothing for it -- it was just a confusing extra control. Recording Settings now hides the bitrate control for the Raw stream format (and for the lossless FLAC and WAV formats) and shows it only for MP3 and OGG, where it actually applies. (#1155)

• Station search finds more stations by their branding and call sign. A station listed under a short name -- "103.1 Austin" for "103.1 Austin's 80s Station" -- used to be unfindable if you searched with the dot, and its station id did nothing. iHeart search now ignores punctuation and matches a station's name, its page address, and its numeric id, so "103.1 Austin", "1031 Austin", and "8403" all land on it. (#1156)

• "Impossible to exit after recording" -- confirmed fixed. A report of Quill Radio becoming completely unresponsive after a recording, with no way to exit (#1153), was the Alt+F4/Exit freeze that 2.0.1 already fixed: closing while a confirmation prompt is up no longer stacks a second one, and every shutdown step on the way out runs without blocking. This release adds a regression test so that exit path can never silently break again. If you ever meet an unresponsive exit, please send the exact steps.

Update 2.0.2

Adds concurrent recording, live Sound Enhancements preview, OptiLab broadcast polish, fixes the 2.0.1 channel mode, and adds two favorites features people asked for:

• Sound Enhancements preview live, and every setting is per-station. You asked for the sliders to work while something is playing -- they do now. Move any control in Playback > Sound Enhancements (the EQ sliders, Even Out Volume, Channel mode, Night mode, or the new broadcast polish) and you hear it on what's playing immediately, no OK required: live and uninterrupted on the default engine, and on the Windows Media engine it reconnects once the change settles. OK keeps and saves it; Cancel or Escape puts everything back exactly as it was when you opened the dialog. And -- as you also asked -- every setting in that dialog is now remembered per station as well as shared, not just the EQ and channel mode: open it while a favorite is playing to give that station its own night mode or broadcast polish too, or open it with nothing playing to set the shared default every other station follows.
• Broadcast polish (OptiLab). Sound Enhancements gained a one-touch broadcast-polish section: pick a mode -- Podcast Leveler for speech, Stream Polish for music, or Smooth Limiter for clean peak control -- set an optional Input trim (0 dB by default) and an Auto-Adapt amount, and there's a checkbox to bypass it while keeping your chosen mode. It levels, adds density, and limits, so a run of stations at wildly different loudness sits at a steadier, fuller level -- especially nice for talk streams and unattended recordings. This is adapted, with thanks and full credit, from OptiLab Core by dgl1984 (github.com/dgl1984/optilab, Apache-2.0). OptiLab itself is a GUI-only plugin (JSFX/CLAP/Winamp DSP) with no library to call, so rather than embedding its Windows-only binary we reproduce the shape of its three modes as ffmpeg filter chains that ride the same pipeline as the rest of Sound Enhancements -- so it previews live on the default engine, applies to recordings, and works cross-platform. It's a faithful adaptation, not a bit-for-bit port of OptiLab's custom DSP; if you want the exact plugin, grab it from dgl1984's repository.
• Record as many stations at once as you want. Until now the recorder held exactly one recording at a time. If you scheduled two shows that overlapped, the first one won and the rest were quietly dropped; and Record Station refused to start while anything else was recording. That limit is gone. Every recording now runs on its own -- overlapping scheduled shows all record, and you can start one Record Station capture after another while listening to something else entirely. Each recording is fully independent: its own connection, its own reconnect-on-a-hiccup handling, its own crash-resume marker, so one recording dropping, finishing, or being stopped never disturbs the others.
  • A limit if you want one. Recording Settings gained Maximum simultaneous recordings. Zero means unlimited -- the default, so everything you ask for records. Set a number to cap it on a slower machine or a metered connection; when the cap is reached, a scheduled recording is held pending and retried within its window instead of being lost.
  • Record Now follows what you're listening to. Press Record Now and it records the station you're on; press it again on that same station and it stops that recording. A background recording of a different station is never stopped by accident -- to stop one of those, use the Recordings window.
  • Stop Recording, and Stop All Recordings. The Recordings window's Stop Recording button stops the one recording you've selected. Stop All Recordings -- in the Record menu, the tray/status menu, and as a button that appears in the Recordings window when two or more are running -- stops every recording at once.
  • The Recordings window shows them all. Each recording in progress is its own row with its own live elapsed time, and the status bar and tray tooltip read "(2 recording)" when several are running together.
  • Crash-resume covers every one. Each recording writes its own resume marker, so after an unexpected close Quill Radio offers to resume all of them -- a single prompt for one interrupted recording, and one batched "Resume all?" prompt when there were several, rather than a stack of dialogs to click through.
• Channel mode Left/Right now plays in one ear only. In 2.0.1, choosing "Left only" or "Right only" accidentally played the audio in both ears. It now sends the whole stereo mix -- nothing lost -- to just the one ear you chose and silences the other, so you really can keep the radio in one ear while your screen reader uses the other. Mono and Stereo are unchanged.
• Sort your favorites: Ascending, Descending, or Unsorted. Preferences (Ctrl+,) gained a Favorites sort order that orders your folders and stations by name (Ascending A to Z, or Descending Z to A) and re-sorts the moment you add one. Unsorted keeps the hand-arranged order you build with Move Up/Down -- and that order is never thrown away, so you can flip back to it any time. Any folder can carry its own sort from its context menu, overriding the default just for that folder's stations.
• Import stations from an M3U/M3U8 playlist. Station > Import Stations from Playlist... reads a playlist file into a folder you pick -- an existing one, or a brand-new path you type at any depth like News/Local -- and, when some of the stations are already favorites, asks whether to skip those or import everything. Station names come from the playlist's #EXTINF lines; a bare URL is named after its host.

Update 2.0.1

A fast follow-up from the first round of live feedback, folded into this same release:

• A recording no longer stops after a minute on a transient hiccup. With "continue recording while re-establishing a connection" on, a momentary 403 Forbidden (an expiring or rotating stream token) or other brief 4xx used to be treated as a permanent failure, so the recording ended instead of reconnecting. Now only genuinely-terminal outcomes -- a full disk, or an HTTP 404/410/451 that means the stream is truly gone -- stop a recording; a transient drop reconnects as it should, and an error ffmpeg already recovered from can no longer strand a later, unrelated drop.
• It is now obvious when recording has begun. Pressing Record Now (or scheduling Record Station) announces "Recording started: " -- a clear spoken confirmation, not the old label-like "Recording ".
• Review and copy What's Playing. A new What's Playing - Review and Copy... command opens a small accessible dialog with the current title and artist in a read-only, selectable field you can arrow through character by character to catch the spelling -- with a Copy button to paste it into a lyrics or store search. A separate Copy What's Playing command copies it straight to the clipboard.
• Channel mode: Stereo, Mono, Left only, or Right only. The old "Combine channels into mono" checkbox in Sound Enhancements is now a Channel mode choice. Left or Right sends the whole stereo mix (nothing lost) to just that one ear and silences the other, so you can listen to the radio in one ear while your screen reader uses the other. It works as your shared default and, like the equalizer, as a per-station setting that's remembered for that station.
• Turn a recording down while it plays back. Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down now change the volume from inside the Recordings window, the same as they do for live radio.

The headline: recordings you can trust

A recording in progress now survives a restart -- and Quill Radio asks before resuming

This is the one that hurt. You set a recording going, the app quits or crashes (or Windows does), and the recording is just gone -- the FFmpeg process it had started keeps writing to a temp file nobody would ever find.

Quill Radio now remembers an in-progress recording. It writes a small marker when a recording starts and clears it on a clean stop, so a crash leaves a breadcrumb. On the next launch it first tidies the temp folder -- any finished orphan file is moved into your recordings folder where you'll actually find it, while a file still being written is left untouched -- and then, if a recording was in progress and is still within a 10-minute grace window, it asks you, once, in a proper accessible dialog:

A recording of WQXR was in progress until 9:00 AM. Resume it for the remaining 12 minute(s)?

Resume (Enter) restarts the recording for the remaining minutes only -- not a fresh full duration. Skip (Escape) leaves it as it is. A Don't ask me again checkbox remembers your choice -- always resume, or never ask -- and you can change it later in Preferences. Nothing happens when nothing was in progress, and a marker file that has gone corrupt is thrown away rather than driving a bogus resume.

Scheduled recordings fire reliably throughout their window, not just at the exact minute

The scheduler used to match the exact start minute. So a recording set for 8:00 that Quill Radio only reached at 8:01 -- a slow launch, a brief stall, the tray icon taking a moment -- silently never fired, and a start that failed still burned the whole occurrence for the day.

The scheduler now treats an entry as due from its start time through the end of its duration, so a late arrival starts with the remaining minutes and catch-up on launch is free. Last-fired is stamped only on a successful start (a failure retries on the next poll while the window is still open), one-time entries auto-disable once they've fired, and when two schedules are due in the same minute while the recorder is busy, the second is held and announced instead of being burned. The scheduler thread itself is now lock-guarded and wrapped so it can no longer die silently.

The Recordings list stops flickering and keeps your place

The Recordings list used to rebuild itself on every refresh, snapping a screen reader back to the top and losing whatever you'd selected. It now updates rows in place, keyed by file path: a no-op when nothing has changed, and when something has, your selection, focus, and scroll position are all preserved instead of the list rebuilding under you mid-read.

The counts are honest now, too. The active recording is counted from the recorder itself, so a recording writing to a temp folder is no longer invisible in the list; a firing schedule is no longer double-counted; and completed one-time entries drop out of the scheduled count. The active row shows a live elapsed time, scheduled entries show their zone-labeled times, and the tray tooltip carries "(recording)" while a capture is running.

Recordings harden against dropped connections, dead streams, and a crashed host

Four pipeline fixes that together make a long unattended recording far more likely to come out whole.

• A reconnect records only the remaining time, not a fresh full duration. A 60-minute show that drops at minute 50 records a roughly 10-minute continuation, not another 60.
• Filenames are never silently overwritten. The old unconditional overwrite is gone; a filename pattern that would produce the same name twice gets " (2)", " (3)" appended instead of clobbering an earlier recording, and continuation parts keep the original start timestamp in their name so they group together.
• A drop is classified before any reconnect attempt is spent. A fatal failure -- your disk is full, or the server took the stream down with an HTTP 4xx such as a 404 or 410 -- stops trying, because the stream is gone and reconnecting would only spam continuation files. A transient drop (a network hiccup or a 5xx) is retried as before.
• A crashed host no longer strands a recording. On Windows the FFmpeg child is tied to Quill Radio's lifetime through a job object, so a crashed or killed Quill Radio takes it down with it instead of leaving a bare FFmpeg writing to your temp folder. And the stop-and-wait fallback moved off the UI thread, so closing the window never hangs on a slow FFmpeg shutdown.

More stations to find: iHeart and TuneIn now in the search

Browse Stations used to search the community RadioBrowser directory and the free SomaFM directory. 2.0 adds two of the largest directories on the internet -- iHeart and TuneIn -- blended into the same results list, so a search for a call sign, a city, or a show now reaches far more of the stations people actually ask for. Every result is labeled with where it came from (iHeart, TuneIn, RadioBrowser, SomaFM), and you play it the same way you always have.

Both are keyless and need no account. iHeart is read straight from its public station sitemap -- a two-request directory index -- and a station's real stream is resolved on demand from its own page the moment you play it, never by bulk-fetching thousands of pages. TuneIn goes through RadioTime's open OPML directory (the same service TuneIn's own web player uses): search returns matching stations and the stream address is looked up only for the ones about to play. To keep a single search from turning into dozens of network round trips, iHeart and TuneIn each resolve a small, capped handful of the most relevant matches per search -- enough to add immediately-playable results without slowing the list down -- while RadioBrowser keeps paging as before. A Refresh button re-fetches the iHeart directory index (it is cached once per Browse Stations session; TuneIn and RadioBrowser are always live).

With four directories in one list, Browse Stations gained the controls to steer it. A Source dropdown lets you narrow the search to just one directory -- All sources, RadioBrowser, iHeart, TuneIn, SomaFM, ACB Media, or Website -- when you already know where a station lives. And the old free-text tag and country boxes are now proper dropdowns: a Tag/genre list and a Country list, filled in from the directory itself, so you pick "jazz" or "United Kingdom" from a list instead of guessing the exact spelling, and choosing one runs the search right away.

TuneIn also feeds Find Streams from a Website: paste a TuneIn station page and Quill Radio resolves its real playable stream, the same on-demand lookup the directory search uses. Find Streams now also recognizes an iHeart or TuneIn page directly rather than handing back a page address that will not play.

Like every other network feature, iHeart and TuneIn are off in Safe Mode, HTTPS-only, and inventoried in QUILL's network-egress audit. This lands in the shared quill package (core/radio/iheart.py, core/radio/tunein.py, core/radio/directory_search.py), so QUILL and QUILL Cast gain the same reach.

Scheduling recordings gained real editing

The Schedule Recording dialog was capture-and-forget: add an entry, and your only other move was to delete it. 2.0 makes the schedule something you can actually manage.

• Edit an existing entry -- change its station, time, or duration without deleting and re-adding it.
• Duplicate an entry -- a fast way to set up the same show on another day, or a second time slot for the same station.
• Enable or disable an entry without losing it -- turn a weekly recording off for a week and back on, instead of deleting and rebuilding it. A disabled entry reads as "(disabled)" in the list and simply does not fire.
• Type the time your way -- "7:30 PM" or "19:30", whichever you think in; both are understood.
• Pin an entry to a time zone -- each schedule entry carries its own zone (defaulting to your local time), so a show quoted in Eastern records at the right moment wherever you are, and the list shows each entry's time with its zone.

What's Playing reaches more stations

When a station will not answer the usual title request -- and after Quill Radio has already tried the playback engine's own title channel -- it now takes one more step: it reads the station's own public "now playing" status page (the Icecast or SHOUTcast status endpoint the stream's own server publishes) and pulls the current title from there. It only ever talks to the same server you are already listening to, and it is off in Safe Mode. The practical result is a real "Now playing" on a batch of stations that used to answer with silence.

For troubleshooting: verbose logging and a log folder you choose

Two additions for when something needs diagnosing. Preferences (Ctrl+,) gained a Verbose logging checkbox that turns on detailed debug logging live, without a restart, and a Log folder setting so you can point the log somewhere easy to find (and hand to a bug report). Recording problems now capture the recorder's own error output into that log as well, so a failed capture leaves a trail instead of a mystery.

Built on the 1.1.0 base

2.0 stands on everything 1.1.0 delivered, and none of it changes:

• The mpv playback engine, used automatically, with the classic Windows Media engine one Preferences setting away.
• Every stream format in real-world use -- MP3, AAC and HE-AAC (AAC+), Ogg Vorbis, Opus, FLAC streams, and HLS (m3u8).
• A second sound card for the radio, live pause and rewind of the stream, and Volume Boost.
• Sound Enhancements as a full listening toolkit -- three-band EQ, compressor, mono downmix, night mode, per-station memories -- applying live on the mpv engine.
• Alt+F4 to the tray, automatic update checks, Preferences, the unified station finder, and file logging.

See release-notes-1.0.md for the 1.0 and 1.1.0 story in full, and CHANGELOG.md for the complete versioned history.

Known notes for this release

• Releases are not yet code-signed: Windows SmartScreen may warn on first run. Choose More info, then Run anyway. Signing is planned.

Not a fork -- a guarantee

Quill Radio runs the exact same radio feature code as QUILL, from the same upstream package. The recordings overhaul in this release lands once, in the shared quill package, and reaches QUILL, Quill Radio, and QUILL Cast together. This repository carries only the wrapper, the installer, the icon, and these docs.