V1.3.0 Is Live. Your Library Just Got A Memory.

Your library remembers now

The centerpiece of this release is the Timeline View. It's a calendar that maps your local playback history - every day you listened, every album you were in the middle of, laid out chronologically. No cloud sync, no account. Just your data, locally, visualized.

But the more interesting part is what Zenteek does with that data:

Timeline Mixes. Every week and every month, Zenteek generates a mix curated entirely from your listening patterns. Not from what's popular. Not from what an algorithm thinks you should hear. From what you actually played. You can regenerate on demand if the first draft doesn't feel right.

More ways to explore

A few things in this release are about making your library feel less like a file browser and more like a collection worth getting lost in.

Album descriptions are now part of the enrichment API. If you haven't refreshed your artist and album profiles in a while, do a refresh-all - you'll start seeing editorial content appear on albums that have it. More will follow. And once descriptions are there, they're searchable.

CMD+SHIFT+F now reaches into descriptions the same way it reaches into lyrics.

Credits moved into a compact popover. Previously opening contributor details meant leaving the album view entirely. Now it floats. You can click through producers and engineers without losing your place - which is how that feature was always supposed to work. It should be fun and easy to access.

Cover Flow now shows a description teaser when one is available. It fits the browsing mood of that view - you're already in a more visual, exploratory headspace when you're flipping through covers. Now you get a even more details about the album you are looking at.

Hi-Res albums get a small badge in the detail view. Small thing. Nice thing.

Album Index: You can also now assign a Release Type to any album manually and filter your library by it. Zenteek tries to get this right from MusicBrainz, but sometimes you know better. Just right-click on the artwork and move it into another type. Your preference is stored locally and survives re-indexing.

Finally, Sources got two additions: the total file size of every source (folder) is now shown in GB, and you can flag individual sources to be excluded from album and artist indexing entirely. Useful if you have a folder of podcasts, playlists or your DJ crates that you don't want polluting your artist and album graph.

The DSP engine, rethought

v1.3.0 is also a significant DSP release.

First, performance. All DSP modules were profiled and optimised. Most of the chain now runs at effectively zero CPU cost. The ones that do consume something sit in the 5% region. This should be noticeable.

The new Oversampling Selector in Playback settings lets you choose between 1x, 2x, and 4x. The default is 4x, which eliminates aliasing artifacts that can creep in at the end of the DSP chain. If you're on a machine where CPU headroom matters, 2x or 1x are honest options.

There's a new global A/B switch for the -entire- DSP chain, with integrated gain compensation so you're not fooled by loudness differences. Blind A/B testing your own DSP is something I've wanted since I built the first native-rate EQ band.

Two new DSP modules:

The Transient Shaper lets you carve attack and sustain independently. Modern mastering often compresses dynamics into submission. This gives some of it back. It's a surgical tool, not a preset experience. Bring a guitar pluck forward, or let a cymbal brush breathe instead of getting buried in the mix.

The Room module is harder to explain. It is not a reverb. It simulates the psychoacoustic sense of listening distance and room height - early reflections, the subtle cues that tell your brain you're in a space rather than wearing headphones. On headphones, music is "in your head." The Room module moves it forward. Some recordings benefit enormously from this. Others don't need it at all.

Interface

The toolbar got new icons and a general visual refresh. macOS has opinions about toolbars. I stopped fighting them. The sidebar was reorganised and all views now have a inline-back-button right at the top. I found the toolbar back button to be a too-long travel with the mouse and it got annoying.

All major Views are now reachable via added key-binds: CMD + 0-9. Home is 1, Albums is 2, etc.

All major Windows also follow a consistent pattern:

1. CMD+SHIFT+W for the main window,
2. CMD+SHIFT+M for the mini-player,
3. CMD+SHIFT+V for the visualizer.

The Album Detail View has a new layout and color treatment to accommodate the editorial descriptions and the Hi-Res badge.

The milkdrop Visualizer is more responsive now - I tweaked the signal equalisation that feeds it, which makes the presets react better to low-end and transient-heavy material. There's also a new shortcut in the Help menu to open your user-presets folder directly, if "you got some .milk".

One bugfix

There was an occasional bug when switching between "Shared" and "Exclusive" audio modes where the sample rate would reconfigure incorrectly, resulting in playback running at 2× or ½× speed. Fixed.

Update is available now via the in-app updater.