Release notes

FluidEQ has a Karaoke tab: songs you already own, with the words, your pitch drawn against the melody, and the chords guessed out of the backing track. It ships no music and downloads none.

The rest of the release is about the config on disk. Your own APO commands are a layer you can see, an edit made in APO itself no longer goes unnoticed, and auto-normalise takes back a decision from 1.0.0 that you will hear.

New

• A Karaoke workspace, built out of your own files. Open a song, add a folder, or drop files anywhere on the window. Audio can be MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC or M4A; lyrics can be .lrc for line timing, enhanced .lrc for word timing, or an UltraStar .txt for syllables and real target notes. Files sharing a name pair into a playlist you can reorder, remove and pick through, and where the pairing is genuinely ambiguous FluidEQ asks instead of guessing. A file this build of Chromium cannot decode says so rather than being called supported.
• Lyrics that follow the track rather than a timer. Every frame asks the audio where it has got to instead of counting forward on its own, which is what keeps a long song from drifting away from its words. Where the file carries word or syllable timing, the current line fills as it is sung. Scroll to read ahead without moving the music, click a line to jump to it, and set the text size to whatever you can read from across the room.
• A pitch lane, honest about where the target comes from. Turn on a microphone — chosen from a list, never opened without your press — and your pitch is drawn live, named as a note, and marked high, in tune or low. Target notes appear only when the song file actually contains them, which today means UltraStar. An .lrc or a bare audio file gets a working live tuner and a line saying there is no target pitch in this song, not an invented melody drawn under your voice. There is no score in either case.
• A melody guide tone. Where a song does carry target notes, FluidEQ will play them as a soft tone at its own volume, so the melody is something you can hear rather than something you read off a lane.
• A performance review. The places you sang high, sang low, or missed are collected as a list of times; pick one and the song jumps there and counts you in — 1, 2, 3, GO.
• A chord guide. FluidEQ analyses the backing track and shows the chord under the playhead and the one coming next, with the seconds until it arrives. It is an estimate made from audio and says so: it reports its own confidence, admits when it cannot find a stable chord, and knows major and minor triads and nothing else.
• A full-screen stage. The window goes to the lyrics, the floating controls fade after two seconds of stillness and come back the moment you move, and the FluidEQ header can be hidden. Playlist, microphone panel and pitch lane all resize and remember their sizes. Your playlist, its order, the selected song and the playhead all come back when FluidEQ next opens.
• The microphone is measured, not recorded. It opens on an explicit press and is released the moment you leave the Karaoke tab. Nothing is recorded, nothing is sent anywhere, and it is not played back through your speakers, so you hear yourself in the room. Echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain are all turned off, because each of them rewrites the pitch being measured — which also means a microphone sitting beside a loudspeaker will be heard singing along with the record. The song keeps playing when you visit another tab. The microphone does not.
• What it is not. Karaoke does not strip the vocal out of a recording, change its key or its tempo, or separate it into stems — an instrumental is something you bring. There is no permanent library and no account.
• Your own Equalizer APO file is a layer like any other. 1.1.0 gave each output a file FluidEQ creates and never writes to, for the APO commands that have no interface here — and then ignored what you put in it. Its filters are now drawn on the graph in orange, named by a chip that switches off like every other layer, and counted in the preamp, so a custom file that boosts no longer pushes the chain past the reserve. Only Preamp, Filter and GraphicEQ are read: a Plugin, Copy or Delay line gets the chip but no curve and no headroom, and the chip's clear button empties the whole file including those lines.
• An edit made in Equalizer APO itself shows up while FluidEQ is open. Change a gain by hand in one of the layer files and the app adopts it, redraws it, re-derives the preamp and saves it into your profile, with the layer's chip renaming itself to say where the change came from. Where the edit uses a filter type FluidEQ cannot represent it is refused silently — your file is left as you wrote it, but nothing on screen says the two have stopped agreeing.
• The AutoEQ and convolution searches remember what you looked for, the way the player's search box already did, with one press to forget all of it.

Changed

• Auto-normalise reserves against the whole curve again. 1.0.0 started discounting a boost by how little music usually holds at that frequency — up to 8 dB of it in the treble. "Usually" is not what a preamp is for: a recording that does reach full scale at 12 kHz was clipped by the reserve meant to prevent exactly that. The allowance is gone and the reserve is measured against the real peak of the chain. A chain whose largest boost is in the treble is several decibels quieter than it was in 1.1.0, everything else is 0.2 dB quieter, and nothing gets louder — some system volumes will want turning up. A cut no longer buys makeup gain unless the whole curve sits below unity.
• A convolution file is measured rather than sketched. The impulse response is analysed when it arrives, so the graph draws the file's own response instead of the approximation published beside it, and a locally imported WAV — which used to draw nothing at all — has a curve. The preamp reserves against what the file actually does, so most published responses come out slightly louder and a hot one is brought down rather than left to clip.
• Squiglink is a link now, not a second library. Browsing GadgetryTech from inside FluidEQ has gone, and the measurement-source picker with it. In its place is a guided import: open Squiglink in your browser, export the EQ text, then paste it or open the file here, with the curve previewed before anything is applied. This is the smaller feature and it is worth saying so — what arrives becomes your editable bands rather than a headphone layer of its own, so it does not survive clearing the EQ. A correction already applied from that database keeps playing; the pickers no longer name it.
• The Ctrl+W cycle trades a stop nobody used for one worth having. Still five stops: Everything → Layers over wave → Curves only → Clean → Wave only. Layers only has gone — it differed from Curves only in the weight of exactly one line — and Clean takes its place: every curve, the grid, the wave and the band handles still drawn, without the nine tinted columns that brighten as Smart EQ hears each range. That is the state for watching a measurement run rather than watching a wash of grey settle over the curves.
• Every curve can be switched off from the View menu, not only the EQ line — and hiding that line now only hides it, leaving the other layers up to read against, where before it quietly rearranged the whole plot. The legend runs in the order Equalizer APO applies the layers. The graph also remembers per tab whether it was open and how the space was split, so closing it on Convolution leaves it open on EQ.
• The Video tab is called Media, in all ten languages, and Config sits at the far edge of the tab strip, away from the tabs that change the sound.
• Euphoria mode is called Rainbow mode.

Fixed

• Smart EQ at zero strength keeps its chip. A measured correction turned all the way down was dropped out of the state altogether, which took away the slider that would have brought it back.
• A dropdown you can search puts the cursor in its search box. The list is drawn outside the control it belongs to, and the field was being looked for inside it, so opening one and typing went nowhere.

Equalizer APO's configuration used to be one block per output, with every layer poured into a single run of numbered filter lines and nothing in it saying where the voicing stopped and your own bands began. It is now a file per layer, and that is where most of what follows comes from: a layer with a file of its own can be switched off without being taken apart, told apart from your own tuning when FluidEQ starts up again, read on disk, and sent to somebody else.

New

• Any layer switches off without being lost, and every correction has a strength. Switching one off leaves its file out of the chain rather than clearing its settings and stashing them, so pressing the switch again puts exactly the same thing back, and it survives a restart. Your bands can finally have a switch of their own, so can the impulse response, and Smart EQ has joined the driver, headphone and voicing layers in having a strength — half of a measured correction is a reasonable thing to want when the measurement is more confident than you are.
• A headphone correction is a layer of its own, on a page of its own. Applying a published measurement used to replace your bands outright, so clearing the EQ threw the correction away with your tuning and Smart EQ read it as error and flattened it over a few passes. It now sits beside your bands with its own chip, strength, switch and curve, from either headphone database.
• Continuous EQ. Pressing Smart EQ applies one measurement whole; this is a mode instead — measure, move a fraction of the way, measure again, for as long as there is music — so one track's emphasis and the next one's cancel out and only what every record agrees about survives, which is your headphones and your room. Detail corrects peaks and dips, Balance also evens out a bright or warm recording, and Target brings every record to the same tonal balance.
• A Config tab, showing what is actually on disk. Every other panel shows what FluidEQ intends; this one shows what Equalizer APO has got, and the two differ exactly when it matters — after a hand edit, another tool, a restore from backup. Each output also gets one file FluidEQ creates empty and never writes again, applied last, for the APO commands that have no interface here.
• Send a chain to somebody. A whole output's tuning exports to a .fluideq file and imports back, always onto the output you are listening to, because that is the only one you can judge the result on.
• Media buttons in the title bar — previous, play/pause and next, commanding whatever is playing anywhere on the computer rather than only our own player. Expect up to a second between the press and the track changing. Windows only.
• Play to a second output at the same time, with a level for each and nothing to install. What it is not: the sound arrives about a fifth of a second late, so it suits music in another room and not video; it runs only while FluidEQ is open; and every mirror carries the correction of the device you are listening on, because that is in the sound before FluidEQ sees it.
• A level meter that reads in real decibels, both channels separately. Nothing on screen answered "how loud is this, really" before.
• Eight genre voicings — rock, metal, pop, hip-hop and R&B, electronic, jazz, classical, acoustic — beside the five that were already there.
• The graph remembers each of its sizes separately, so arranging the plot for a video in full screen no longer rearranges it for editing bands afterwards. The legend is a set of switches, one per curve, and the View menu can switch off the level meter and the title-bar wave.
• The player stays signed in between runs. It ran on a session thrown away when the app closed, which made it no use to anyone with an account: a signed-out music service shows ads to somebody who pays not to see them. The guarantee changes from "nothing is kept" to "nothing is kept that you did not ask for, and one press throws all of it away" — that press is a new button in the player's toolbar, always visible.

Changed

• Auto-normalise gives volume back as well as taking it away. The preamp could only ever attenuate, so a chain that merely cut made everything quieter and nothing put it back. It will not invent volume either: a narrow cut restores nothing, because away from its centre the chain never moved.
• Smart EQ measures the record, not what you have already done to it. It treated everything it heard as correctable, so it could not see past a cut — a range dropped 20 dB by mistake hid the very evidence that the cut was wrong.
• Loudness has been removed. It was an EQ curve wearing the name of something Equalizer APO cannot do: a loudness control on an amplifier raises perceived level, and APO has filters and nothing else. Measured, it lifted the ends by 4.5 dB, the preamp reserved 4.1 dB against that boost, and the midrange ended five decibels down — turning it on made things quieter. The equal-loudness voicing curve stays, being the same idea stated honestly.
• Spotify and SoundCloud have gone, and Suno is being tried. A button leading to a page that does not play is worse than no button. Spotify signed in, browsed and searched perfectly and never played a note, its audio being encrypted with a system this runtime has no decoder for; SoundCloud refused a sign-in by all four of its routes without producing a single error anywhere we could see. Suno is on the same terms as everything else: it stays only if it works.
• A published correction reaches Equalizer APO as the curve it was published as. Some ship as a list of points rather than as filters and APO draws those natively, where until now it was FluidEQ's approximation being written out. Nothing on screen ever showed the difference — only the file APO reads.
• On startup, FluidEQ can tell which layer wrote what. It used to refuse to read a config back at all while any layer was live, because a voicing and a row of hand-placed bands looked identical in the text. That refusal now applies only to a flat config, and which layers you had switched off comes back too.
• Zoom moves in half steps, about 9.5% a press instead of 20%, because settling on a size is what people actually do with it.

Fixed

• A chain somebody sends you can no longer carry code into Windows audio. A .fluideq is advertised as a settings file, and the part of it holding your own Equalizer APO commands was written into the config word for word — into a file included all the way up to APO's own, in a language that can load libraries. An imported block is now refused if any line loads code, includes another file, or carries a control character that could end one command and start another; the rest of the chain still imports, and the panel says what was dropped and why.
• The player no longer writes sign-in addresses to the log. Every address it navigated to was recorded whole, and the report-a-problem tool attaches the tail of that log and offers to post it publicly. The tail of a sign-in address is not a location, it is the credential.
• The player stopped handing a storage permission to anything that asked, and an impulse response file name can no longer smuggle a second command past the config writer — a newline in a name ends a line in an Equalizer APO config.
• A band drag starts where you grabbed it. Pressing a handle threw the band upward before the cursor had moved a pixel, and grabbing one off-centre snapped it by however far off you were: it was measured against the drawn curve rather than against your pointer, and the two had stopped being the same curve.
• A layer that is switched off stays switched off. Smart EQ preserved the voicing, the driver and the headphone correction whether or not you had bypassed them, so it looked for shapes that were not in the sound and rebuilt the layer you had just switched off inside its own.
• Importing a chain no longer destroys the thing being imported. It dropped the headphone correction on the way in, then saved the profile back from what was live a moment later.
• Clear on the AutoEQ page clears the correction and leaves your bands alone. It flattened every band, which was right back when clearing a reference meant undoing the bands it had written — so it wiped a tuning it no longer owned and left the correction playing with nothing on screen naming it.
• A strength slider can always be moved. It was disabled while its layer was off, which pinned the strength wherever it happened to be. Dragging it brings the layer back, dragging it to zero switches the layer off, and switching a layer on from zero goes to full.
• The bands do not vanish when every one of them is at zero. A flat chain is written as a preamp and no filter lines, because a band at 0 dB does nothing — but read back, "no filters" and "no bands" look identical.
• A switched-off equaliser cannot be edited, and neither can the band handles with the engine off. Both stayed draggable while looking inert, so you could spend a minute shaping a curve connected to nothing.
• The EQ chip is about the bands, which is all it holds now; it was naming itself after the headphone model, so one pair of headphones appeared twice in the same row. The headphone chip no longer vanishes at zero strength either.
• Opening a dropdown no longer takes the pane's scrollbar with it, freezing the panel and letting its content jump sideways into the gutter. The View menu measures itself rather than running off the bottom of the screen, and the expanded graph has its left edge back.

The version number is the only thing here that changed suddenly. FluidEQ has been a finished program for a while — automatic per-output profiles, four processing layers written into one Equalizer APO config, a measured correction, ten languages, an updater that works. What it did not have was a video playing underneath the spectrum, and that is what the last two releases were for. It works now, on every site it offers, in every size the graph comes in.

So: 1.0. Not because a milestone was reached, but because calling it 0.x had stopped being honest.

New

• Switch any layer off without losing it. Press a chip in Also applied and that layer leaves the config — the chip stays, dimmed, and pressing it again puts the same settings back. Nothing is recomputed, because nothing was lost. It is how you find out whether a correction is actually an improvement: the same passage, both ways, a second apart. Voicing, driver, Smart EQ and loudness for now.
• The bands have a chip of their own, named by the model they came from and the measurement behind it, or by how many bands there are when you placed them yourself. It says (modified) once you have moved them, so the label never claims a curve that is no longer on screen.
• Loudness moved in with the other layers, off the waveform meter. It is written into the Equalizer APO chain like everything else in that row, and it belongs where the rest of them are. Euphoria mode now brings it with it, and takes it away again.
• Full screen, rebuilt. The window takes the whole display, the side panes go, and the picture reaches all four corners. The controls become a small card that fades out when nothing is happening and comes back when you move — click the drawing to hide or show them at once. The creature stays in the corner.
• Keep the top bar in full screen, from the View menu, if you would rather see where you are. On by default.
• See through and Blur are in the View menu, where there is room for them, instead of taking half the control strip.
• Every site remembers where you left it. Switching between YouTube, YouTube Music, SoundCloud, Bandcamp and Twitch now comes back to the track that was playing, a few seconds before where you stopped, and carries on. Only one player ever runs, so leaving a site still stops it — this is what makes coming back cost nothing. Pressing the site you are already on goes to its front page.
• The wave can hang, mirror, or grow from the middle. Ctrl+I steps through four shapes: standing up, hanging down, mirrored into two halves that share the height, and mirrored outward from the centre line.
• Stretch the wave across the whole card. With the grid hidden there is no scale to leave room for, so the drawing takes the space the labels were using.

Changed

• Less is taken from your volume. The preamp reserves headroom against what music actually contains rather than against a flat signal to 20 kHz — a boost at 12 kHz can never cost its full value, because nothing arrives at full scale up there. Chains that were quiet for no audible reason get several decibels back, and are no closer to clipping than before.

• Smart EQ always measures from flat. The switch that asked has gone: a region already cut hard has almost no energy left in it, so measuring the corrected output means the correction hides the very problem it is causing. There was only ever one right answer.

• The chain reads in the order it makes sense. Convolution, then the driver correction, then your bands, then voicing, then Smart EQ last — physical, intended, taste, measured. Nothing sounds different; the config is now readable at two in the morning.

• Only the live trace gets the rainbow. The other curves keep the colours their legend names them by, which is what makes the legend worth having.

• Vimeo has been removed. It renders its listings entirely on the client, from an API that returns nothing to a session it does not recognise — search, Staff Picks and the watch feed all arrive with their tabs and filters and not one result. FluidEQ's player is signed out by design and always will be, so that is the only Vimeo it can ever see. A button onto an empty page is worse than no button.

• The player signs into nothing, and remembers nothing. Its session is held in memory and dies with the app, and sign-in is turned away at each site's own front door. No account of yours is ever the identity behind what it does.

• A refused link leaves you where you are. Following one that goes outside the player used to move you to a different site's front page; now the page you were on simply stays, with a note saying what was refused.

• The spectrum is drawn on a canvas. Both of them — the one across the graph and the small meter in the title bar. They were built out of SVG paths before, which meant that thirty times a second the browser was handed a fresh description of the shape as text, several thousand characters of it for the denser looks, and asked to re-read it, re-measure it and repaint that part of the window. A canvas is told to draw and draws. Nothing about the looks changed: the same forty-six of them, the same palettes, the same glow, all built by the same code — only what receives the drawing is different.

• The graph no longer redraws itself for sound it is not showing. The chart woke up around twenty-two times a second whether or not the wave was on screen, rebuilt everything it owns, and threw the result away. Now only the parts that actually show live audio listen for it: the wave, the clipping warning, and the measurement overlay.

• The controls above the graph sit on a panel of their own instead of floating loose over the drawing, and in full screen there is one panel rather than a panel inside a panel.

• The filter types are drawn against a shared 0 dB line, and named. They used to sit on two different baselines — a peak rising off the floor next to a low shelf falling from the ceiling — which made a shelf read as a treble cut and made the pairs look swapped. They are mirror images of each other now, and the band editor spells out which is which.

Fixed

• Expanded view and full screen hold steady. Moving between the two, or playing one video after another, used to leave the picture missing until the page was reloaded. Both now give the video the whole pane, every time and in any order.
• YouTube Music fills the pane properly, with no dark band down its side.
• Twitch fills it too, with no band along the bottom.
• The editor stops moving while you tune. The Also applied row used to appear out of nothing the first time a layer went live, pushing everything below it down mid-drag. It now holds its line whether or not there is anything in it.
• The player says what it refused. A link that went nowhere used to go nowhere silently, which is indistinguishable from a broken page. Refusals, failed loads and the page's own errors are now in the log.
• Editing several bands at once no longer fails. Every band in a selection sent its own request, and each of those rewrote the whole Equalizer APO configuration. Ten selected bands meant ten rewrites for one turn of a knob, which was slow enough that the edit gave up and reported a timeout — while having worked. A group edit is one write now. Frequency is left out of it on purpose: it is what tells the bands apart, and moving them all by the same number of hertz stacks them on top of each other.
• The band editor closes when you deselect. It used to fall back to the first band whenever nothing was selected, so clicking away left it open on a band that was highlighted nowhere — and moving a control edited a band you had just let go of.
• Less memory is used while the graph is open. Some of what the graph allocated was never handed back; less of it is now. This is an improvement rather than a conclusion — the remaining growth is still being tracked down, and closing the graph pane has always released it.
• The live capture cleans up after itself. Starting it crosses two points where it can be cancelled, and neither was checked, so a capture could survive the request to stop it — along with a timer and a listener that nothing could reach afterwards.
• Euphoria stops doing work nobody can see. It published a value several times a second that no stylesheet ever read, which made the browser recalculate the whole window's styling for nothing, and it left its glow layers in place after the mode ended.

New

• A Video tab. A player inside FluidEQ — YouTube, YouTube Music, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Vimeo, Twitch — so a track can be tuned while it plays, with the spectrum moving underneath it. It is not a browser: it goes to those sites and nowhere else, deliberately.
• The search box remembers. What you looked for before comes back as you type, closest matches first, with a cross on each to forget it. Anyone checking a crossover plays the same reference track twenty times in a week.
• Two sizes for the graph, on one menu. Expand view (Ctrl+S) floats it over the workspace while you keep working; Full screen (Ctrl+F) gives it the whole screen and takes the video player fullscreen with it. Escape comes back from either.
• See through the graph. In full screen, two sliders decide how much of what is behind shows through and how hard it is blurred — all the way to a graph drawn straight over the video with no panel at all.
• Hide the grid (Ctrl+G), so nothing is left but the wave. Separate from Wave only (Ctrl+W), which hides the EQ curves and keeps the scale.
• Every shortcut is written down in that menu, beside the thing it does.
• Loudness. One press, under the euphoria pill, and quiet listening stops sounding thin. The ear loses bass and treble far faster than it loses the midrange as the volume comes down — which is why music at low level sounds hollow rather than merely quiet — so this puts back what your hearing stops picking up. It reads as fuller while the peak level barely moves, and it cannot clip you: the preamp comes down to meet it automatically, the same way it does for every other layer. Not a compressor — Equalizer APO has no dynamics processing at all, and a control claiming otherwise would be lying.
• Report a problem, in the actions menu. It gathers the logs, strips anything that identifies you, shows you the whole thing, and lets you post it as a GitHub issue or email it privately. Nothing is sent until you press one of those, and you can read and edit every word first. Account names, file paths, email addresses and network share names are removed automatically.
• Fix audio problems, also in the actions menu. When the sound stops there are four things worth trying, they escalate, and until now they sat in a flat list with nothing to say which to press first or what each one costs you. This puts them in order — restart the audio service, re-select your devices, reinstall Equalizer APO, then remove and re-add the device across two restarts — with what each one fixes and what it will cost, and a button on every step that can be automated. Stop at the first one that works.

Fixed

• Signing in to YouTube closed the app. Not the tab — the whole thing. The guard that turns back a link leading off the allowed sites was cancelling the navigation from inside the notification that it had started, and taking Chromium down with it.
• The graph goes on watching after the audio device changes. Reinstalling Equalizer APO, restarting the audio service or switching the default device leaves the capture running against an endpoint Windows has invalidated — live, silent, and never recovering. The trace simply stopped moving. It now notices and re-acquires.
• The divider between the panes keeps its proportion. It remembered a number of pixels, so a split set on a large monitor was most of a laptop screen — and the correction that kept the panes on screen overwrote the setting, losing it for good. It remembers the ratio.
• Reinstall Equalizer APO says something useful when the installer is missing. It showed the words apo-bundle-missing over "please restart the application". It now opens Equalizer APO's own download page, which is the one situation where that is the right answer.
• The window's own errors reach the log. Nothing in the interface had ever written a line to the file a bug report attaches, so a report about the part of the app you actually look at described everything except it. Crashes in the main process are recorded too, rather than leaving a window that just disappears.
• "Equalizer APO is not responding" can be clicked. It reopens the notice with the Install and Retry buttons — which, once dismissed, previously could not be reached again at all, because it only reappears when the error text changes and for a missing audio engine it never does.
• The player comes back where you left it after a restart, instead of on YouTube's home page.
• The live trace is at full strength in Wave only. It was drawn at half strength to sit under the EQ curves — which are exactly what that mode hides.
• Ordinary limits stop calling themselves internal errors. Adding a band when you already have the maximum, or removing the last one, answered with "Internal Error: Invalid parameter — please reach out to the developers". Nothing had gone wrong and no developer was needed. They now say what the limit is and what to do instead.

Fixed

• Euphoria mode could not be switched off. Once you had earned it, the toggle did nothing — the mode was reading "your current streak is at the ceiling" as well as the switch, and a streak does not reset when you stop playing. So it stayed true forever and held the colours on no matter what you pressed. Winning is now a moment rather than a state: it unlocks the mode for good and switches it on there and then, and after that the switch is the only thing that decides.
• The development shortcut invented a score. In development builds, the button that jumps to euphoria used to write a full 19,350 points and a 36-tap streak straight into the run — so the share card could show a number nobody had played for. It now only turns the mode on. Your score is yours.

New

• Ctrl+E turns euphoria mode on and off, once you have earned it. Before that it does nothing at all: a shortcut that worked early would give away that there is something to find.

Changed

• The setup log records nothing that identifies you. It was writing the install directory, which on a normal install contains your Windows account name. It now records only what happened — found, offered, declined, started, failed — so the file is safe to send to anyone without reading it first.

Fixed

• The installer offered to install Equalizer APO and then did nothing. You said yes, no setup window appeared, and FluidEQ opened over the top of it without an audio engine. Equalizer APO's installer requires administrator permission, and the call FluidEQ used to start it cannot ask for it — it failed instantly, and the message saying so went into a pane that one-click installers do not show. It now asks properly, so Windows raises the permission prompt and APO's setup opens. If permission is declined, FluidEQ says so plainly instead of carrying on in silence.
• FluidEQ could not tell whether Equalizer APO was already installed. Installers run as 32-bit programs and Windows quietly redirects their registry reads away from where 64-bit software records itself, so the check always came back empty. Setup would therefore have re-run APO's installer over a perfectly good installation, and uninstalling FluidEQ could never offer to remove APO, because it could not find it either.
• Uninstalling could not remove Equalizer APO even when you asked it to, for the same permission reason as the install.
• The Install Equalizer APO button inside the app was broken the same way. It reported success, and no installer ever opened. Both places now ask Windows for permission properly.

Changed

• Setup writes a log. Every decision it makes about Equalizer APO — found or not found, offered, declined, started, failed — goes to %APPDATA%FluidEQlogsinstall.log, next to the app's own logs. None of this was visible before, which is why the problem above survived a release.
• A build missing its copy of Equalizer APO now says so during setup, rather than skipping the step without explanation.

New

• Equalizer APO comes with FluidEQ. It is inside the installer — nothing is downloaded and there is no second website to visit. Setup offers to run it, and APO's own installer opens so you can choose which audio devices to equalise and get its restart prompt from the tool that owns it. Already have Equalizer APO? It is left completely alone, whatever version it is. This was the worst moment in getting started and it is gone.
• Uninstalling asks whether to remove Equalizer APO too, and defaults to No. It is a system-wide audio component and other applications may be relying on it, so removing it is never the quiet default. Updating never asks.
• The Install APO button inside the app runs the bundled copy rather than opening a download page.

Changed

• The equaliser is properly inert without Equalizer APO. The window still opens, the meter still runs and the graph still draws — the app is worth looking at either way — but every control that writes to the config greys out rather than looking live over an engine that is not installed.
• The share card opens in its own window. It used to replace the game inside the support panel, which meant a picture the size of the panel trying to fit inside that panel; on a short screen the buttons that save and post it ended up below the fold.
• The support panel fits a short screen. It gives things up in order of how little they are missed rather than shrinking everything at once — first the spacing tightens, then the aside about how the app was built goes, and last the QR code, since anyone on a window that short is at a desk and the link beside it does the same job in one click.

New

• The live spectrum can be drawn thirty-six different ways, in two palettes. Bars, a ridge, a staircase, floating peak caps, a contour map that shows how wide a peak is rather than only how tall, a slope field that draws which way the spectrum is turning, stalactites hung from the ceiling, a heart monitor that beats once per band, a car riding the loudest frequency along a road made of the trace, and a rank of little sprites hanging at their levels. Pick one from the searchable list on the legend, or click the graph to walk through them while you listen — Space does the same, and Ctrl with either steps back.
• Every form moves in its own way. A bar snaps up and hangs, the way a level meter does, so a kick lands as a step. A ridge is a landscape and moves like one, because a hill that twitches reads as noise. The pulse is nearly instant, because a heartbeat that arrives late is not a heartbeat. Choosing a drawing changes how the music feels, not just what it looks like.
• Wave only hides the EQ response, the voicing and driver layers and the band handles, leaving the live trace alone on the grid.
• Full screen clears the bands out of the way and presents the graph in the middle of the workspace. Esc brings them back.
• Ten ways to draw the titlebar meter, cycled by clicking it.
• Smart EQ is its own layer. It used to rewrite your bands, so applying it overwrote the tuning you had done by hand and clearing it took your work with it. It now sits on top of everything else with its own chip, and survives clearing an AutoEQ reference. It also no longer inverts your own bands: the target it corrects towards includes them, where before it measured as if they were not there.
• An applied reference arrives band by band, in frequency order, instead of every slider jumping at once. You can see what it did rather than just what it left behind.
• Zoom the whole interface with Ctrl and +, - or 0. Keyboard only, deliberately — the mouse wheel belongs to the sliders.
• There is a game hidden in the support panel, for anyone with the contribution badge. Tap the creature or press space on the beat of whatever you are playing. It reads the real percussion out of your own audio, so it is your music you are playing along to.
• Euphoria mode. Thirty-six consecutive perfect taps and the entire application goes rainbow with the music: the bands, the response curve, the meter, the menus and the release notes. One mistake and it all goes back to being an equaliser.
• Share your run. A card is drawn with the creature, your score and the mode's own look, ready to post — copy it straight to the clipboard and paste it into whatever you are writing.

Changed

• Both waveforms move at the display's rate, not the analyser's. Sound is measured about twenty-two times a second, so drawing only when a measurement lands meant two frames in three showed the same picture as the one before — which the eye reads as stepping. They are drawn between measurements now, gliding toward each new one: at the full rate of your screen during euphoria, and capped at thirty otherwise, because a meter beside an equaliser does not need sixty and the frames are not free.
• The graph keeps time with the music instead of catching up with it. The analysis window was twice as long as it needed to be and the smoothing on top of it added more, so the picture arrived about ninety milliseconds after the sound. It is closer to fifty now, and it is quick to rise and slow to fall rather than sluggish in both directions, which is what makes it pump rather than sway.
• The graph reaches further across. The axis started at 10Hz but ended at 25kHz, which on a logarithmic scale left three times as much empty space before 20Hz as after 20kHz. Both marks now sit the same distance from their edge, and the drawing gets the space back.
• The grid and the supporting curves have stepped back so the response you are editing is obviously the subject rather than one line among five.
• The installer opens FluidEQ when it finishes. Updates already did; a fresh install left you looking at a closed wizard.
• FluidEQ is called FluidEQ in Task Manager, in development as well as in the installed app.
• The language picker is one of the app's own dropdowns, not the operating system's, and it opens downwards at a sensible size.
• The titlebar sits almost flush with the page, so the window reads as one surface rather than a bar stuck on top of one.
• The delete-band button becomes an icon when the row runs out of room, and gets its label back when there is space for it. It is a bin now, not a cross: a cross reads as "close", which is the wrong promise.
• The score measures accuracy, not endurance. Only a perfect adds; anything else pays a little and gives back a share of the total. Playing longer cannot move anyone past their own precision.

Fixed

• FluidEQ was capturing your screen the entire time it was open, and the memory that took never came back — several gigabytes and still climbing after a few minutes. Windows only offers system audio through the same call that offers screen sharing, so a video track arrives whether or not anything wants one. It was being switched off in a way that mutes what a track delivers while leaving the capture behind it running, so full-resolution frames were produced continuously and nothing ever read them. The video is now released outright the moment the audio arrives.
• Euphoria mode ate memory without limit — a few hundred megabytes with it off, several gigabytes and still climbing with it on. The travelling colour was animated on the window itself and inherited by everything inside it, so the browser had to recompute every element on the page sixty times a second for as long as the mode was running; the interface went sluggish, the graph stuttered, and the waste piled up faster than it could be cleared. The colour now travels only on the handful of things that actually show it. Two of those things also carried an animated glow over a picture that redraws twenty-two times a second, which meant re-rendering everything beneath it on every frame — that glow sits outside the moving part now. It looks the same.
• A request that timed out leaked its listener, forever. The bridge that cleans up after an internal request rebuilt the wrong function and so removed nothing at all, silently. Beyond the memory, the abandoned listener stayed first in the queue and would answer somebody else's later request with the wrong result.
• A band deleted mid-animation stayed in memory until the animation it was never going to finish would have ended. One is nothing; an afternoon of adding, dragging and deleting bands is not, and none of it is visible while it accumulates.
• Clearing an applied reference clears its bands. The notes previously claimed the bands stayed, which was wrong in both directions — a reference is where your tuning came from, not a label beside it.
• The pet stops reacting to a paused waveform, and stops swaying in a silent room. The analyser freezes mid-frame when paused, and it was dancing to a reading that had stopped being true.
• The graph could not draw. 0.6.0 shipped a build that dropped d3's transition module, so every animated part of the response chart threw e.transition is not a function and the window came up broken. The build had been told d3 was free of side effects, which is true of almost all of it and false of exactly the piece that matters: transitions install themselves onto d3's selections when the module is evaluated, and nothing refers to them by name, so the bundler quite reasonably concluded they were unused and removed them. 0.6.0 and 0.6.1 were both withdrawn; everything they contained is in this release.

Faster

• The renderer is 44% smaller. Nothing was being tree-shaken at all — the TypeScript build emitted require() calls before webpack ever saw the import graph, so every unused corner of every library shipped. d3 alone was dragging in geo, force, contour and delaunay to draw an axis.
• The creature stopped re-rendering twenty-two times a second. It sits in the titlebar, so that never stopped: not when the window was idle, not when nothing was playing.
• The device list stops polling while the window is hidden. Each tick enumerates every audio endpoint on the machine.
• The spectrum is drawn as sixty-four columns rather than three hundred and twenty. At that density the bars touched, so it read as a filled area with a ragged top — a worse picture, built from a path string five times longer, rebuilt on every frame.
• The spellchecker is gone. It was downloading a dictionary to check the spelling of preset names.

New

• The installer asks which language to use, preselecting your Windows one. Nine of the app's ten, because NSIS has no Hindi translation — FluidEQ still speaks it, the setup wizard does not, which is better than a half-English wizard pretending otherwise.

Changed

• The release notes open on top of the support dialog instead of replacing it. Reading them is a detour from deciding whether to contribute, not a departure from it, so closing them puts you back where you were.
• The pet sways like someone listening. It leans, holds there for a beat and comes back, rather than swinging evenly from side to side — and the lean hinges low, where a neck would be, instead of spinning the whole creature about its middle. Still only for anyone with the contribution badge.

Fixed

• Escape closed both dialogs at once when the release notes were open over the support dialog.

New

• FluidEQ updates itself. It checks GitHub for a new version, downloads it in the background and offers to restart, with the progress shown in the app rather than as an easy-to-miss system toast. Being offline is not an error and says nothing.
• What's new. This file, rendered inside the app — shown once after an update, and in the actions menu whenever you want it.
• The window reopens where you left it, at the size you left it, maximized if it was. The position is only reused if a display still covers it, so unplugging a second monitor cannot strand it somewhere unreachable.
• No white flash on launch. The window waits until the interface has actually painted instead of appearing blank and filling in.
• Measurements are capped at what is believable. Published corrections routinely ask for +16 dB at the edges of the audible band, where the rig is measuring its own coupling error rather than the headphone. References are now limited to 12 dB, and 8 dB below 25 Hz or above 14 kHz. Bands you move yourself are untouched — that is your business.
• Smart EQ shows its work, applying the correction one band at a time in frequency order rather than making every slider jump at once.
• Clear the applied reference from the AutoEQ panel, the same way you clear a convolution. The bands go with it — a reference is not a label sitting beside your tuning, it is where that tuning came from, and dropping only the name left a curve on screen that nothing on screen accounted for. Your voicing, driver profile and Smart EQ are separate layers and are untouched.

Changed

• No more profile name box. Renaming happens on the profile row itself, where the name is, with accept and cancel buttons on the field. Two places to type the same thing meant keeping them in sync, and it made Save ambiguous — you could never tell whether it would create a profile or overwrite one. New profile is the only way to create one now, so Save says plainly that it updates.
• Smart EQ leaves your band layout alone. An earlier build expanded a coarse layout to 31 bands before measuring. Ten bands genuinely cannot describe a measured response, but how many you use is your decision.
• The applied reference records the measurement, not just the model. Most models have several and they do not sound alike.

Fixed

• The config adoption added in 0.4.0 could empty the band editor. A block with a preamp and no filters is what FluidEQ writes for a flat EQ, not "the user cleared their bands", and reading it as truth left the EQ page with no sliders at all. Adoption now also refuses when a voicing or driver layer is live, since those reach APO as ordinary filter lines and would otherwise be pulled into the editor as bands and then applied twice.
• One output's profile could overwrite another's. Two outputs could point at the same profile file, so saving on the speakers silently overwrote the headphones — easy to hit, because "Untitled profile 1" is exactly the name two outputs both end up with. Saving now takes a free name or one this output already owns.
• Every output keeps a profile. Deleting the one an output was playing through left it with nothing to save to; that case now resets the sound to neutral and creates a fresh empty profile.
• Renaming a profile to a longer version of its own name aborted halfway. Renaming "Standard" to "Standard 2" cancelled the moment the text passed through "Standard".
• Changing the band count during Smart EQ did nothing useful. The check meant to notice it could never fire, so the measurement applied gains to bands that no longer existed. It now measures again against the new layout.
• Dropdowns in the AutoEQ panel were clipped by the equalizer below them.

New

• The Equalizer APO config is the source of truth. On startup FluidEQ reads the config on disk instead of trusting its own copy of the state. If anything else changed it — a hand edit, another tool, an APO reinstall, a restore from backup — the file wins. What the config cannot express (which voicing, which driver profile, which headphone reference) still lives in the profile, because those reach APO as ordinary filter lines and reading them back as bands would apply them twice.
• Import EQ settings and impulse responses. An Equalizer APO ParametricEQ or GraphicEQ file, a FluidEQ profile, or any WAV impulse response. The reader understands the full APO grammar, including the pass and notch bands that carry no Gain token.
• Ten languages. English, 简体中文, हिन्दी, Español, Français, Português, Русский, 日本語, Deutsch, Italiano. Picked from Windows on first run, changeable from the actions menu.
• The applied headphone is remembered. Applying an AutoEQ reference used to leave nothing behind saying where the curve came from. The model now travels with the profile, is named on the EQ page, and is re-selected in the picker.
• Everything shaping your sound is named. An "Also applied" strip on the EQ page lists any convolution, voicing, driver correction or headphone reference that is live, each removable in one click.
• In-app updates. FluidEQ checks GitHub for a new version, downloads it in the background and offers to restart. Being offline is not an error.
• The window reopens where you left it, at the size you left it, maximized if it was.

Changed

• The workspace scrolls instead of squeezing every panel into the window. The response graph keeps a readable height on a short window, and the profile list is no longer three rows tall.
• The named-profile list shows every profile rather than only the one attached to the current output, with the live one marked. New profile creates one for real, named "Untitled profile 1", 2, and so on.
• The AutoEQ library is collapsible, and states which model is applied even when folded.
• Icons on the actions menu and the EQ toolbar; only the live band layout is highlighted rather than all four.
• One shared motion vocabulary: menus unfold from the control that opened them, tab panels rise into place, notices slide in. All of it respects prefers-reduced-motion.

Fixed

• isAutoPreAmpOn travels with the profile. Turning auto-normalise off on one output turned it off on every output, and the next auto-save wrote that in.
• Switching outputs reloads everything. The bands, preamp, voicing, driver correction and convolution all belong to the output they were tuned on, but the app only found out about a switch by accident.
• The EQ toolbar drew over its own heading — eleven controls and no window width at which they fit beside a title.
• Saving a band with a High Pass or Band Pass filter and reloading replaced the whole EQ with ten default bands. The preset validator only accepted three of the seven filter types.

New

• Driver-type compensation. Twelve profiles for what you are listening on: dynamic, planar magnetic, balanced armature, electrostatic, bone conduction, the common diaphragm materials, and driver size — each its own layer with a strength slider, drawn as its own curve on the graph.
• Voicing. Five curated target curves — music, movies, games, speech, late night — written after your bands so your own tuning is never touched.
• Convolution. Apply a verified minimum-phase impulse response from the AutoEq catalogue before the parametric EQ.
• Automatic per-output profiles. Edit any control and the tuning saves itself and attaches to the active Windows endpoint. A manual save keeps a separate copy you can always restore.
• Smart EQ measures what is actually coming out of your output and flattens what it hears.

Fixed

• Clear EQ left the previous profile fully audible. Equalizer APO accumulates blocks rather than replacing them, so the device block and the session block stacked instead of the newer one winning.
• One preamp for the whole chain. Every layer used to add its own, so stacking a voicing on a convolution buried the signal.
• Loading some Squiglink measurements wrote Fc NaN Hz into the config and took the whole chain out.

FluidEQ began as a fork of AQUA and spent its early versions on the device-profile foundation: discovering Windows render endpoints, mapping the stable endpoint GUID rather than the display name, and generating one Equalizer APO block per assignment.