Changelog

No stable releases yet.

• 1.0.0-beta.22 2026-07-27
  Changed

  • Local dictation is much faster after the first use. Parakeet and WhisperKit models now stay loaded for as long as Stenobar is running, so each dictation after the first takes well under a second instead of around one. The models also start loading in the background when Stenobar launches, so the first dictation of a session no longer waits on a twenty-second model load — previously that load ran at the worst possible moment, right after you stopped speaking. Switching models in Settings → Dictation reloads immediately so the new one is ready when you are. If you use Apple Speech or a cloud provider, nothing loads and nothing changes.
  • Internal: the local transcription providers now have automated test coverage of their result handling and branch selection, which previously could only be verified by hand against a downloaded model.
  Fixed

  • Dictation no longer gets stuck on "Transcribing…". Ending a take almost immediately — a fumbled hotkey press, or a modifier chord you thought better of — used to hand the near-empty recording to the full local pipeline anyway, which spent tens of seconds loading models before reporting the empty transcript it could never have avoided. Takes shorter than 0.3 s are now discarded up front.
  • Added a way out of a transcription that's taking too long: an ✕ on the dictation HUD, or Esc. Cancelling frees the hotkey immediately instead of swallowing every subsequent press, and nothing is pasted or copied.
  • A transcription that never returns at all now gives up after 60 seconds and says so, rather than leaving dictation permanently unavailable until you restart the app. Applies to the Thoughts HUD as well.
• 1.0.0-beta.21 2026-07-13
  Added

  • Hold a single modifier key to dictate or capture a thought. In Settings → Shortcuts, each "hold" shortcut now takes an optional bare modifier — pick a side (left or right) and a key (⌘ ⌃ ⌥ ⇧), and holding just that key starts recording. Press any other key while it's down and the take is cancelled silently, so your everyday shortcuts still work: ⌘C copies as usual and nothing is transcribed or pasted. Right-side keys are the sweet spot, since most shortcuts are typed with the left hand. Your existing key-combo shortcuts keep working alongside it, and a modifier can drive dictation or Thoughts, but not both. Needs Accessibility permission — without it the modifier shortcut stays inert.
• 1.0.0-beta.20 2026-07-09
  Fixed

  • Speaker labels and per-line timestamps now actually work on long local transcriptions. beta.19 introduced a bug that shuffled words at the seams between processing windows; the app noticed the transcript no longer matched and threw the timed lines away, leaving one untimed block labelled with a single speaker. Anything past roughly half a minute was affected.
  • Setting "key terms & context" on a recording no longer costs you timestamps and speaker labels. Locally transcribed recordings with key terms were always returned as one unlabelled block, at any length.
  • Locally transcribing with key terms no longer silently drops pieces of the transcript — on a 15-minute recording it was losing a few hundred characters scattered through the middle.
• 1.0.0-beta.19 2026-07-09
  Added

  • Speaker labels on local transcripts: Parakeet transcription can now work out who is speaking and tag each line, splitting lines where the speaker changes. Turn on "Speaker diarization" in Settings → Transcription and download the one-time ~35 MB model; it runs entirely on-device. Leave the model undownloaded and transcription works exactly as before, without labels.
  • Parakeet transcripts now have per-line timestamps: local transcriptions split into timed lines, so playback follows the transcript and clicking a line jumps the audio — just like cloud transcripts. (Runs using key-term boosting keep single-block text for now.)
  Changed

  • Privacy: local Parakeet transcription and dictation are now enforced offline. The app touches the network only for model downloads you start in Settings (and dictation's first-run model download). If a downloaded model is damaged, you'll now see an error asking you to re-download it instead of the app silently re-fetching it.
  Fixed

  • Local (Parakeet) transcription and dictation of anything longer than about 15 seconds could drop words, lose the ending, or come back empty — showing "No speech detected" after real speech. Long audio now runs through the streaming engine, and long transcripts get the same per-line timestamps and speaker labels as short ones (previously they collapsed to a single untimed block attributed to one speaker).
  • Dark mode: the strip above the recordings list no longer lags behind the rest of the window while you drag the window or play video behind it. The same artifact is gone from the Thoughts window.
• 1.0.0-beta.18 2026-07-07
  Added

  • Summaries: each recording can now carry its own optional "key terms & context" — names and their correct spellings, jargon, or topics to focus on — which is appended to whichever summary prompt you've selected. Set it from the book icon next to the summary controls; it stays with the recording, so re-summarizing keeps using it.
  Changed

  • New installs now default AssemblyAI transcription to the newer universal-3-5-pro model, falling back to universal-3-pro. If you've customized the model list in Settings, your selection is unchanged.
• 1.0.0-beta.17 2026-07-06
  Fixed

  • If the system audio capture stream dies mid-recording (a rare macOS capture-engine failure), Stenobar now stops cleanly, saves everything captured up to that point, and explains what happened in the menu-bar popover — previously the recording timer kept running while nothing was being captured.
  • Auto-delete no longer removes a recording from the library when moving its files to the Trash fails: the recording stays fully intact and the cleanup is retried on the next sweep, instead of leaving orphaned audio files with their title, tags, and markers lost.
  • Failures that previously printed only to the developer console (disk-full write errors, library save errors, screen-capture refresh errors) are now written to the diagnostics log, so problem reports are actually diagnosable.
  Changed

  • Performance: smoother interface while recording and dictating, faster live-streaming summaries, and snappier typing and search in large libraries.
• 1.0.0-beta.16 2026-07-06
  Added

  • Summary prompts: save a library of named prompts, assign one per project, and pick one ad-hoc when summarizing a recording.
  • Per-project summary AI: each project can override the summary provider and model, and tags/title generation can use a separate provider and model (both globally and per project).
• 1.0.0-beta.15 2026-06-28
  Added

  • List-aware Thoughts: when a dictated thought is clearly an enumeration, Stenobar formats its description as a list instead of a comma run-on, and each destination renders it natively — Todoist sub-tasks, TickTick and Things checklist items, Notion bulleted lists, Apple Notes bullet lists, and structured items in the Shortcuts payload. Obsidian and Bear get the markdown list for free, and Apple Reminders keeps it as a text list in the note. The Thoughts Inbox shows list descriptions with per-category glyphs (checkboxes for tasks and reminders, bullets for notes).
  Changed

  • Captured thoughts now keep a cleaned-up description separate from your verbatim words. Each thought carries an editable, reformatted description plus the original spoken text shown read-only beneath it, in both the Inbox and the preview sheet. Synced notes send the tidied description by default; a new "Include original words in synced notes" setting appends the verbatim capture below it for apps like Reminders, Notes, and Todoist.
  • The Thoughts Inbox now shows a processing spinner on a thought's row while it is still being classified and routed.
• 1.0.0-beta.14 2026-06-28
  Added

  • Obsidian as a Thoughts destination: route a captured thought straight into your Obsidian vault as a new note via the obsidian:// URL scheme, configured in Settings → Integrations.
  • Bear as a Thoughts destination: file a thought as a Bear note over Bear's x-callback-url API, with confirmation that the note was actually created.
  • Notion as a Thoughts destination: connect your workspace with OAuth and send a thought as a new page under a parent page you choose.
• 1.0.0-beta.13 2026-06-23
  Fixed

  • The Settings window now gets a Dock icon and the app menu bar (Stenobar / File / Edit …) like the Library and Thoughts windows, instead of leaving the app menu-bar-only — so you can click the Dock icon to return to it. The main menu bar also no longer intermittently fails to appear when a Library or Thoughts window is open and frontmost.
  • The Dock icon's right-click menu now lists the open Library (Recordings) and Thoughts windows so you can jump straight to them; previously only Settings appeared there.
• 1.0.0-beta.12 2026-06-23
  Fixed

  • Microphone recordings from external USB audio interfaces that deliver 24-bit (or 32-bit) integer PCM — e.g. the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 — no longer capture as static/buzz. The WAV writer previously decoded every non-float buffer as 16-bit, misaligning every sample; it now decodes 16/24/32-bit signed PCM correctly.
  • The selected microphone is now remembered across recordings and app launches instead of snapping back to the system-default input each time. The global hotkey honors the same saved device.
• 1.0.0-beta.11 2026-06-15
  Added

  • AssemblyAI as a dictation provider: low-latency streaming transcription via AssemblyAI Universal-Streaming, selectable in Settings → Dictation and surfaced in onboarding. Gated on an AssemblyAI API key.
  • Deepgram as a dictation provider: streaming transcription with a model picker (Flux and Nova-3) in Settings → Dictation and onboarding. Gated on a Deepgram API key.
• 1.0.0-beta.10 2026-06-14
  Added

  • App Intents for Shortcuts, Siri, and Spotlight: start/stop/toggle recording, drop a marker, toggle dictation, capture a thought, open the library or Thoughts inbox, and get your last recording — with built-in Siri phrases and no setup.
• 1.0.0-beta.9 2026-06-10
  Changed

  • Library derivation is memoized and transcript search parallelized for a snappier library at scale.
  Fixed

  • Onboarding playback no longer clips the start: microphone warm-up is trimmed and the player follows audio-format swaps.
• 1.0.0-beta.8 2026-06-10
  Changed

  • GUI performance: API-key presence checks no longer hit the Keychain on every render (Settings panes, summary availability in the library detail view); markdown summaries are styled once per text snapshot instead of on every redraw (most visible while a summary streams in); transcript rows skip re-rendering when nothing about them changed; and the streaming summary's follow-the-tail auto-scroll is coalesced instead of firing on every LLM delta.
  Fixed

  • Numbered lists in summaries no longer render every item as "1." — items keep their numbers from the markdown source, including when paragraphs sit between the numbered points (the shape LLM summaries usually produce).
• 1.0.0-beta.7 2026-06-10
  Fixed

  • Windowless deep links (stenobar://dictate, record, thought, marker) no longer pop the Recordings library open as a side effect. open stenobar://… reactivates the app, and SwiftUI auto-presents the first declared Window scene on that reopen — so the library surfaced even when the command needed no window. The hidden bridge window is now declared first, so the reopen resolves to it instead.
• 1.0.0-beta.6 2026-06-09
  Added

  • stenobar:// URL scheme and a JSON library index for external integrations (e.g. a Raycast extension): open the library / a recording / project / Thoughts inbox / settings, and fire record-toggle, dictate, thought-capture, and marker the same way the global hotkeys do. A versioned index.json snapshot of recordings + thoughts is refreshed on every change so external tools can search without touching SwiftData. "Copy Link" actions produce stenobar://recording/<uuid> links. See docs/URL-SCHEME.md.
• 1.0.0-beta.5 2026-06-09
  Changed

  • Public GitHub links now point to the stenobar-releases repo so they resolve for end users (the source repo is private).
• 1.0.0-beta.4 2026-06-09
  Added

  • Website links (Home, Privacy, License) in the About box.
  Changed

  • Release tooling syncs PRIVACY and LICENSE to the public releases repo.
• 1.0.0-beta.3 2026-06-09
  Fixed

  • App failed to launch on some Macs: hardened runtime is disabled for ad-hoc Sparkle builds so Library Validation no longer blocks Sparkle.framework.
• 1.0.0-beta.2 2026-06-09
  Changed

  • Release tooling: publish the DMG + Sparkle appcast to the public stenobar-releases repo; the DMG is named Stenobar.dmg.