Release notes

Preview 2024-04-23

Bug fixes and improvements

• Fixed issue where pressing Alt+F to open the File menu while the station list was in focus also toggled favorites
• You can now press Del on a user editable station in the list to trigger the delete banner (but it won't get focused for now)
• You can also press Esc while in the station list to clear the selection
• The right click context menu in the station list now contains keyboard shortcut information to ease discovery
• The about page also lists the new shortcuts

Preview 2024-04-22

Bug fixes and improvements

• Fixed crash bug that happened when double clicking top track or station title
• Attempted to fix issues with resuming playback on startup, which can be affected by slow sound card initialization
• Press E on keyboard to edit selected station in station list, only applies to editable stations
• Station list now tries to restore selection and keyboard focus when reactivated like after saving changes to a station

Preview 2024-04-21

Bug fixes and improvements

• Fixed station listen count and health reporting (it wasn't reporting anything at all)
• Added improved error logging for a particular error I can't figure out without more info

Preview 2024-04-15

Bug fixes and improvements

• Fixed so window no longer disappears after minimizing or closing to tray
• Restore window in center of screen on startup if coordinates are more than half the window off screen
• Some minor internal improvements
• Fixed issue where Screamer always thought there was a new version available due to incorrect timestamps

Preview 2024-04-14

Welcome to the brand new Screamer Radio!

Announcement post

Summary of big changes

• Brand new user interface with light and dark themes
• Station listings have been redesigned to allow for more stations
• New logo to celebrate the new user interface
• Faster native binary written in .NET 8
• Screamer Radio Plus subscription service to support the project

Design and functional changes in more detail

• Refreshed design and new logo
• Light and dark themes, default switches based on system theme
• Updated icons with Bootstrap Icons
• Separated favorites and search results into separate tabs
• Moved tag information to a fixed side panel
• Selection of a radio station displays details in the side panel
• Play, stop and edit buttons in rows where the tags used to be (visible on hover or when active or selected)
• Added navigation buttons for browsing stations
• Added a 'clear selection' button for stations
• Added a 'select random station' button for stations
• Improved settings view with organized tabs and cleaner form
• Added context menu options for links
• Added informative tooltips on various elements
• Added more options to the context menu for radio stations
• Pressing F1 highlights the radio station list for easier keyboard navigation
• Added a new option to prevent search from being focused at startup
• Added close buttons on tabs for discoverability and accessibility
• Changed "What's new" link to "Release notes" in upgrade notifications
• Added a post-upgrade notification to release notes

Support more stream types

• Support HLS streams
• Support Opus streams
• Support FLAC streams

Technical changes

• .NET Framework is no more, Screamer is now using modern .NET 8
• The new UI is written using Avalonia instead of WPF
• Binary size has increased, but performance has improved due to use of native code
• Implemented SQLite for storing radio stations and favorites

Bug fixes and improvements

• Improved tray icon resolution on high-DPI displays
• Corrected memory usage display in the 'About' view
• Fixed issue where pressing Ctrl+O did not refocus the open URL input when deselected
• Improved settings file handling by temporarily writing to a scratch file before moving it into place, reducing the risk of data loss during writing

Preview 2024-04-13

This release is primarily focused on preparing for the next major update that introduces a brand new UI based on Avalonia and leave the old .NET Framework behind in favor of .NET 8. I have also made some other important changes and bug fixes.

New features

• Added support for media hot keys, allowing you to control playback using keyboard shortcuts.

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue where the open URL notification would not enable the open button.
• Matched the AppUserModelID of the Squirrel-generated shortcuts to ensure that pinned taskbar shortcuts work as expected.

Other changes

• Switched to a different tray icon library for compatibility with .NET 8.
• Used a new code signing certificate from SSL.com
• Moved Squirrel out of process instead of in .NET to allow for upgrade to .NET 8
• Made a large number of other internal changes to prepare for the next big release

Please note that due to unforeseen circumstances, I was unable to renew the current code signing certificate and had to purchase a new one. As a result, you may see Windows SmartScreen warnings initially.

Preview 2022-07-26

Bug fixes:

• Fix URL not being updated when changing stream

Other changes:

• The optional Google Analytics tracking has been completely removed
• The list of licenses has been updated

Preview 2022-07-19

With this release .NET dll-files are no longer bundled into the exe using the old unsupported tool LibZ because it unfortunately caused TLS issues. As a bonus Screamer Radio should now start a lot faster too.

Bug fixes:

• TLS connections should work again

Improvements:

• Startup performance is greatly increased

Preview 2022-06-20

Bug fixes:

• Tray notification did not handle empty titles
• Copying text to clipboard using WPF API requires retries
• Connecting to stations could block the UI thread

Preview 2022-06-05-2

Bug fixes:

• Fix failures to connect to streams because of duplicate header values

Preview 2022-06-05

This release does not include many new features but lots of code was improved over several months of hard work.

New features:

• Show album art provided by Shoutcast stream (try Soma FM for instance)
• Added setting to always show station list on startup
• Added option to copy album image URL

Improvements:

• Improved how Screamer connects to stations, AAC+ streams connect faster
• Improved keyboard navigation using tab, should be much more usable
• Improved stream log making it more consistent
• Improved add/edit station dialog, now using proper input validation
• Now using high quality album art scaling which looks better on high DPI screens
• Small album art images are cached in settings and restored when restarting to avoid a network request
• Improved perceived performance when interacting with search results and clicking tags
• Improved startup performance by loading more settings asynchronously
• Improved performance in various other ways
• Added 256x256 icon sizes

Other changes:

• Updated to .NET Framework v4.7.2
• Updated to BASS v2.4.16.1
• Replaced BASS.NET with ManagedBass
• Replaced Caliburn Micro with MVVM Toolkit
• Removed last traces of Windows Forms, now using WPF for everything, even system tray icon
• Code signing certificate is replaced, the old one expired
• Modernized code base in many ways
• Massive internal refactorings to make the code more well structured

Preview 2019-11-22

Changes:

• Show warning for users with old .NET Framework versions, upcoming releases will require .NET Framework 4.7.2 or newer

Bug fixes:

• Fixed bug affecting notifications in application
• Fixed bugs when importing stations with no website URLs

Other:

• Added more internal error handling to prevent crashes
• Some internal improvements
• WIll now automatically check for upgrades at most once per day, not every startup

Preview 2019-10-07

Bug fixes:

• Fixed an issue that could cause the program to crash when clicking the tabs

Preview 2019-10-06

New features:

• Added always on top toggle to view menu
• Added output device selection to audio menu
• Added visualization frequency setting, can now also be turned off
• Prevent computer from sleeping while playing (can be changed in settings)

Changes:

• Better grouping of settings in settings tab
• Moved settings to view menu
• Moved view menu next to help menu

Improvements:

• Improved scroll bars, they now behave like normal scroll bars
• Level visualization rewritten from scratch, should use much less processing power
• Better looking drop down boxes

Other:

• Removed 32-bit restriction, will run as a 64-bit process on 64-bit systems
• Some minor performance improvements

Preview 2019-02-04

New features

• Add "Center window" menu option to system tray menu
• Automatically center the window if it starts up off screen

Improvements

• Change of output device no longer requires stopping playback
• Default output device will automatically switch when the system device setting changes
• Window centering should now work on high DPI screens
• Improve how browsers are launched when clicking links

Bug fixes:

• Fix race condition when closing
• Fix internal exception when reading stream metadata
• Fix crash bug in about tab

Other:

• Upgrade BASS to version 2.4.14

Preview 2018-10-01

Minor tweaks:

• Restore volume on restart even if the last played station can not be loaded
• More detailed error messages when sound subsystem fails

Other:

• Internal component updates and code improvements

Preview 2018-09-21

Bug fixes:

• Fixed issue when loading history on startup
• Fixed startup deadlock issue

Other:

• Will no longer wait forever to read/write files

Preview 2018-09-01

Bug fixes:

• Fixed a few internal bugs caused by race conditions
• Playback was not stopped when desktop was locked
• Connect to random crashed when station list was empty

Other:

• Refactored file I/O with improved locking mechanism
• Some other internal refactorings
• Removed some legacy ClickOnce code
• Remove .NET assembly signing, code signing is enough
• Upgraded dependencies

Preview 2018-08-26

Mostly some internal changes in preparation for the stable release.

Minor tweaks:

• Add link to release notes in about menu and in update notification