Your one-time purchase includes every future update. Here’s everything that has shipped, newest first.
Each entry describes Beltr as it was on that day. Some older notes mention engines, features and prices Beltr no longer uses, like Demucs, Whisper and launch pricing. For what ships today, see the FAQ and pricing.
v1.68.6
Your real graphics card, named correctly on Windows
Beltr shows your real graphics card on Windows: on PCs with a game-streaming app installed (Apollo, Sunshine, Parsec and others add a virtual monitor), Settings could list that virtual display as your GPU. Beltr now picks your actual card, and prefers a dedicated card over the processor’s built-in graphics. A wrong name you saw before corrects itself the first time you open this version.
v1.68.5
Beltr starts again on macOS
Beltr starts again on macOS: versions 1.68.2 through 1.68.4 would not launch on any Mac that isn’t running the very newest macOS, failing with “The server failed to start” before Beltr ever appeared. The cause was on our side: those builds accidentally required the same macOS version as our build machine. Install this version over the top and it will start normally, with your songs, settings and license untouched.
v1.68.4
Louder mics, a smoother “Prepare all”, and music videos that keep working
Mics are loud enough again: singers were coming through quieter than the music. They’re back to full volume.
“Prepare all” no longer freezes Beltr: preparing a big library at once could stall the TV, phones and dashboard. Everything stays responsive now.
Closing Beltr doesn’t lose your place: a song that was being prepared when you quit picks up again next time.
Music videos keep working: Beltr now keeps its video downloader up to date by itself, and you can update it from Settings. A night with no internet no longer marks songs as having no video for good.
v1.68.3
Clearer microphones, and music videos on the Store version
Clearer microphone sound: voices coming through the TV no longer wobble, especially on low notes.
Music videos work on the Microsoft Store version: they were failing to download. They now download and play, and songs that failed before will try again the next time they play.
The Sing button shows up on your phone: when it’s your turn, the phone web remote shows the Sing button again, so you can sing through your phone.
Your music shows up right away: connecting, rescanning or removing a music folder now updates your library straight away, without reloading the page.
v1.68.2
The pitch bar is back, and the GPU pack works from the Store
The pitch bar and pitch scoring were missing on new songs: a library Beltr uses to follow the melody changed underneath it the day 1.68.0 shipped, so songs prepared on 1.68.0 or 1.68.1 came out with no melody track: no notes on the pitch bar, and nothing to score your singing against. Beltr now stays on the version that works. You don’t need to prepare anything again: a song missing its melody track builds one the first time you open it.
The GPU pack now speeds up song preparation on the Microsoft Store version: on the Store version of Beltr for Windows, the GPU pack could install and pass its checks, then fail on every song, because Windows refused to let it read the audio. Each song quietly fell back to the much slower CPU, so the pack made no difference at all. It now does the work on your graphics card as it should. The direct download from beltr.app was not affected.
v1.68.1
Steadier phone mics, and control over how the room sounds
Holding a note no longer makes your voice vanish: Beltr listens for the squeal a microphone makes when it picks up its own sound, and turns the microphone down when it hears one. Any note held longer than a moment looked like that squeal, so the singer dropped far below the backing track and stayed there for the rest of the song. Scoring was never affected — only what the room could hear. Beltr can now tell a held note from a squeal.
Choose which speakers the TV plays through: a Speakers row in the Stage panel sends the music and everyone’s voices to whichever output you pick — the TV’s own speakers, a soundbar, a mixer. Beltr remembers the choice. On the TV in a browser.
Turn down or mute any phone’s microphone from the TV: the Host tab on your phone, and the dashboard, now list every microphone in the room with its own mute button and volume slider — so one singer who is much louder than the rest, or a phone somebody left face-down in a pocket, doesn’t spoil the song. On the TV in a browser.
Less delay again when you sing through your phone: your voice takes an even shorter path from the phone to the speakers than it did in 1.68.0. Your phone also stays awake while it is being used as a microphone, and tells you what the microphone is actually doing: on the TV, scoring only, or reconnecting. If your voice is arriving through Bluetooth earbuds, or coming in at telephone quality, the phone says so — both make you sound worse than the phone’s own microphone does.
A brief Wi-Fi hiccup no longer ends your turn: the microphone used to switch off and need another tap on Sing — and on iPhone, another permission prompt on top. It now waits out the interruption and picks back up on its own. When something really does stop it — a phone call, the screen locking, another app taking the microphone — your phone says which, and how to carry on. Declining to have a performance recorded also stays answered now, instead of the question coming back on every single song.
The secure address for phone mics: following the link used to sign you in as a brand new guest, losing your spot in the queue and your scores — you stay yourself now, and the instructions name the exact buttons to tap to get past the one-time browser warning, which are different in Safari and Chrome. The address also works on a computer with a VPN running: Beltr had been building it around the VPN’s address instead of the one phones on your Wi-Fi actually reach, which gave those phones a second, more alarming warning. If that already happened to you, updating alone will not clear it — Beltr deliberately keeps an address it has already handed out, so that phones which accepted it are not asked again. To get the corrected one, delete the tls folder inside your Beltr data folder and start Beltr again.
v1.68.0
Phone mics that keep up, and mics on self-hosted setups
Phone microphones work on self-hosted Beltr, with nothing extra to set up: phone browsers only turn on the microphone for a secure address, which used to mean putting your own setup in front of Beltr before anyone could sing from their phone. Beltr now offers a secure address itself, and the desktop app shows it in Settings. The first phone to use it sees a one-time browser warning to accept — the address is Beltr’s own, and it never leaves your home network. The room code and its QR still use the ordinary address, so nothing changes for anyone joining the usual way.
Much less delay when you sing through your phone: your voice used to arrive at the TV noticeably late, and worse, the delay grew as the night went on — one stutter in the Wi-Fi and everything stayed behind for the rest of the song. Every step of the trip is quicker now, and the TV quietly catches back up after a hiccup instead of staying behind. This covers all of them: the TV in a browser, Apple TV, Google TV, the phone remote and the web remote. Phones on the web remote gain the most, because they had been falling back to a slow path that added delay all on its own.
Songs that can’t be prepared now tell you why: purchased tracks that are copy-protected are named as such instead of quietly failing, and when a music folder can’t be opened — a drive unplugged, a share asleep, permissions changed — Beltr says so rather than treating every song inside it as missing.
Apple TV: the stage panel opens with the Select button or any swipe, instead of only a swipe down.
Google TV: the app no longer shows as incompatible on some TV boxes and projectors. If your device still isn’t offered one, there is an installable copy on the Beltr releases page. The old Fire TV app has been retired — the newer Google TV app replaces it, looks better and keeps up with the music properly, though Fire TV sticks from around 2016 and earlier cannot run it.
v1.67.3
A signed Windows installer, and no more network-drive freezes
The Windows installer is signed: the direct download has been shipping unsigned, so Windows called it “Unknown publisher” and asked whether you really wanted to run something from nobody in particular. Everything in the installer now carries a signature that names Casa Vargas LLC, and that is the name Windows shows. SmartScreen can still appear for a while — it goes by how many people have installed a given signature, and this one is brand new — but the publisher is no longer a blank. The Microsoft Store build never had the warning and is unchanged.
Beltr freezing for minutes at a time with music on a network drive: with a large library on a NAS or a shared folder, Beltr would stop answering altogether — no song list, no remotes, no TV — for ten to thirty minutes at a stretch, several times a day. It happened after “Prepare all” reached songs whose files the share would no longer open: every one of those misses set off a fresh walk of the entire folder, dozens of walks at once on a share holding 25,000 files, and everything else Beltr wanted to do queued up behind them. The same unreachable songs also came back in every “Prepare all”, because a walk counted a file it could merely list as present again — one library retried the same 132 songs 606 times. Beltr now scans one music folder at a time, keeps those scans away from the work the rest of the app is doing, waits ten minutes before re-scanning a folder for the same reason, and only brings a missing song back when its file can actually be opened.
A window that went white and stayed white: when the dashboard or the TV display crashed, Beltr left a blank rectangle on the screen with no way back except quitting the app. It now reloads a window whose display has crashed, and if that keeps happening — three times in five minutes — it asks whether to reload or quit rather than looping. Crashes, freezes and pages that failed to load are written to Beltr’s log, so a support bundle finally carries some account of what the window did.
“Previous run ended without a clean shutdown” after a perfectly normal quit: on Windows, Beltr stopped its server by killing it outright, so the next launch always reported the previous one as unclean — a warning that has sent more than one investigation looking for a crash that never happened. Quitting, installing an update and restarting from Settings now ask the server to finish what it is doing and stop; it is killed only if it has not stopped within eight seconds. Mac and Linux already shut down this way.
Self-hosted: docker stop no longer waits out its ten-second timer when a dashboard or TV is connected. The server gives open connections three seconds to finish and then shuts down properly.
v1.67.2
Music videos download again, and big libraries finish preparing
Music videos that found a match and then failed: Beltr searched, picked the right official video, started the download — and ended in “download failed” every time. YouTube sends the picture and the sound as two separate streams, so Beltr has to join them into one file, and the tool that does the joining is ffmpeg, which ships inside Beltr. On some Windows installs ffmpeg would start and then sit there forever instead of doing the work, and the downloader took that to mean ffmpeg was missing and gave up. One library failed 753 downloads in a row this way without a single success. ffmpeg is now started in a way that cannot stall like that. The error was misleading too: it said ffmpeg “is not installed”, sending people off to install a copy they already had, and it now says the video and audio couldn’t be combined. If your searches come back empty instead — no candidates at all, rather than a download that fails — that is a different problem: YouTube is asking Beltr to prove it isn’t a robot, and this release doesn’t change that.
Preparing a large library stopping partway through: import a few thousand songs in one sitting and preparation worked for the first few hundred, then every remaining song failed instantly with an error about an environment variable being too long. Beltr was adding the same entry to a list of program locations once per song and never taking it off again, until the list outgrew a limit Windows puts on it and nothing could start at all. Restarting Beltr cleared it — for another few hundred songs. The list no longer grows.
The waveform missing from new songs, and other jobs that could stall: the loudness shape the TV and dashboard draw behind a song is read from the original file, and that read started ffmpeg the same unsafe way, so on an affected machine it timed out on every song and the shape never arrived. Importing MIDI files, exporting an MP3+G disc, lining a music video up with its song and checking a karaoke video for motion all started ffmpeg that way too and could stall for the same reason. They are all fixed together.
v1.67.1
Network music folders reconnect by themselves
A NAS music folder stuck on “offline”: a Mac doesn’t reconnect network shares on its own after a restart or sleep, so if your NAS wasn’t connected when Beltr started, its music folder went offline with the Rescan button greyed out, and the only way back was to remove the folder and add it again. Beltr now remembers which share each music folder lives on and reconnects it when the folder goes missing: at launch, when you pick a song from it, or with the new Reconnect button in Settings → Music folders. It signs in with the password your Mac saved in the Keychain and never pops up a login window. Connecting the share yourself in Finder works too: the folder comes back online the next time you open Settings. A folder added before this update learns its share the next time Beltr checks it while the share is connected.
v1.67.0
Big libraries open fast, and Beltr is on Homebrew
“Failed to start” on a large library: every launch, Beltr checks the songs it was preparing when it last closed so it can mark the interrupted ones and offer to resume them — and it was doing that before opening for business, one song folder at a time. On a library of several thousand songs on an external or slow drive that took two to four minutes, and the app gave up first with “Server did not report a port within 30 seconds.” Beltr now opens immediately and tidies up in the background. The resume prompt still waits for it, so it is as accurate as ever; it just arrives a moment later.
The dashboard locking up in the first minute: on a large library, working out which songs could be resumed read every song’s folder on the main thread and froze everything else — the song list, the remotes, the TV — for up to a minute. That work happens off to the side now.
A slow start is no longer reported as a failure: once Beltr’s server is running, the startup window says “Still starting up, this can take a few minutes…” after a minute instead of showing an error, and only gives up after ten. On Windows it could also miss the server’s own “I’m alive” signal entirely because of how Windows ends its lines, which is why the error arrived so quickly there.
Install from Homebrew: if you live in the terminal, the Mac app is now a cask — brew trust --tap casavargas/tap && brew tap CasaVargas/tap && brew install --cask beltr. Beltr still updates itself after that, so there is nothing to brew upgrade.
v1.66.4
Linux installers for the music-video fix
Same change as v1.66.3, now for Linux too: the Linux installers for v1.66.2 and v1.66.3 never built because of a quoting mistake in the build script. This release carries the music-video fix for every platform. Mac and Windows users on v1.66.3 get an update with nothing new in it.
v1.66.3
Official videos that were never downloaded
Music-video backgrounds find more videos: when a song’s official video is posted on the artist’s own channel with a title like “Official HD Video” or “Official 4K Video”, Beltr found it and then threw it away, because it only trusted titles that said “Official Video” or “Official Music Video” exactly. It also marked the song as having no video, so it never looked again. Those titles now count. If some of your songs were marked “no video found” by this mistake, open Settings → Downloaded videos and press Clear “no video found” flags; each song is searched again the next time it plays.
v1.66.2
Linux installers for the settings fix
Same changes as v1.66.1, now for Linux too: the v1.66.1 Linux installers never built because the build’s Debian mirror was taken down mid-release. This release carries the settings fix, the cache fix and the new progress card for every platform. Mac and Windows users on v1.66.1 get an update with nothing new in it.
v1.66.1
Settings save again on Windows and macOS
Settings that would not save: on Windows and macOS, changing many settings failed with “That did not save. Check that Beltr is still running.” Beltr was trying to create a settings folder in the same place the app already keeps a file with the same name, and those systems treat the two names as one. Settings now live in a folder nothing else uses, and anything you had managed to set before is kept.
Artist portraits and Last.fm details could vanish: they were being stored inside a folder the app clears out on its own. They now have a home of their own and are moved there on first launch.
A quieter progress card: the card that shows a song preparing is now a single thin line with the song, the stage it is in, the time left and its place in the batch. The glowing bars are gone.
v1.66.0
A game-show stage for Name That Beltr
A real game-show stage: the 3D stage is now a lit set, with a mirrored floor, a wall of lights that dances to the snippet, and glass podiums that fill with each player’s score.
Every moment plays out on stage: a buzz swings a spotlight onto that player’s podium, right answers throw sparks, wrong ones strobe red, and the record flips over to show the cover art. The final pick spins an upright category wheel, and the winner gets a rostrum with confetti cannons.
Older machines and slower TVs: the flat stage gets the same look, the 3D stage turns its effects down when it can’t keep up, and it switches to the flat stage instead of going black if the graphics driver drops out mid-game.
The lyrics timing editor stops jumping: scrolling or clicking a line pauses follow-playback for a few seconds, a Follow playback switch turns it off, the list is taller, and a speed control slows the song to 0.75× or 0.5× while you tap in timings.
v1.65.1
Microsoft Store packaging fix
The Store package installs again: the Store build now requires Windows 10 version 1809 or newer, which the Store demands of its packages. The Store never received v1.65.0, so this release carries everything from it.
v1.65.0
Name That Beltr, rebuilt
One game, rebuilt: a snippet from your library plays on the TV, phones buzz, fastest finger names the song. Type the answer or pick from four. Snippets start on a sung phrase and get shorter each act, with points rising to match. Play from a playlist or the whole library.
Fair buzzes: phones sync their clocks, ties go to a lightning buzz, and a wrong answer opens a steal for everyone else. A final round at double points, picked by category by whoever leads.
Host controls on the phone and dashboard: pause, replay, skip, adjust a score, and rule on close answers.
A 3D stage with podiums and confetti, or a flat version on older machines. Two to eight players, or up to four teams.
The iPhone and Android remotes are buzzers, via the App Store and Google Play. Games need the desktop app’s TV or a browser TV.
Fixes: on Windows the GPU pack starts on a fresh install — two Visual C++ runtime files were missing beside the pack and the repair could not see it; it now fixes itself. Lyrics you chose are kept on a track Beltr thinks is instrumental, instead of vanishing and failing the sync, and sync refusals now say why. Self-hosted: the container log no longer prints a line every two seconds while a dashboard waits for a TV.
v1.64.1
A big library opens without locking up
A large library no longer freezes the dashboard: the Songs view was fetching the entire catalog in one response and building every row before it drew anything, so a library in the tens of thousands of songs could hang the browser for a minute or leave it unresponsive. The dashboard now loads in bounded pages and fills in as you scroll. Counts, filters and selection all still read against the whole library.
A separation helper stops advertising itself to your TVs: a computer set up only to share its separation still runs a full Beltr server, so it turned up in the Apple TV, Google TV and phone auto-discovery list beside the real host, all but indistinguishable from it. Picking the wrong one landed you in an empty library. Settings, under Network, now has Let TVs on this network find this computer, and the sharing card points at it. Turning it off does not cut anything else off, since entering the host address by hand still works. A machine can still be both a host and a helper if that is what you want.
Apple TV: the whole on-stage panel is reachable again: with the panel open, no direction on the Siri Remote moved focus off Pause, which left the guide vocals, music video background and Leave room controls drawn but unusable. Every control takes focus now, Menu still closes the panel, and Play/Pause still works while a panel button is highlighted.
Google TV: the same fix for the D-pad: with the transport panel open, nothing in it took focus at all, Pause included. The panel now opens on Pause, and Down walks the whole panel in order. An unselected chip and the “Off” value were also rendering white on white the moment the remote pointed at them. The TV app fixes ship through the App Store and Google Play, not the desktop installer.
v1.64.0
A slow computer can borrow a fast one
Use another computer’s GPU: if Beltr runs on a home server, a mini PC or anything without a graphics card, a Mac or a Windows PC with the GPU pack on the same network can do the vocal separation for it. In Settings, under Processing, turn on Share this computer’s separation on the fast machine, copy the address and token, and paste them into Separation helper on the slow one. Press Test before you switch it on. The library, the queue, the lyrics and every screen stay where they were — only the separation travels, and only while it runs.
It gets out of the way when it is not there: if the fast machine is asleep, unreachable or has sharing switched off, the song is prepared on the machine that asked, once, exactly as before. You lose the speed, not the song. Anyone holding the token can send audio to the sharing machine, the same trusted-network assumption Beltr already makes about the host PIN, so do not share an install that is reachable from the internet. Details are on the self-hosted page.
Find the songs with no lyrics: the Songs view has two new chips beside the readiness pills. No lyrics keeps prepared songs whose lyrics lookup came back empty or failed. Unsynced keeps songs that found words but no timings, so nothing sweeps on the TV; those are candidates for Sync Now rather than deletion. Both count across the whole library, so the number reads the same whatever else you have filtered to.
Delete selected: the same selection that drives Export selected now drives a Delete selected button, with one confirmation naming the count. Songs that are still processing are skipped and named rather than stopping the run. A filter that hides every song now says “No songs match” instead of showing the empty-library drop zone, which read as a wiped library right after clearing a batch.
An audio rip in a video file is a song again: an MP3 wrapped in an .mp4 with one cover image held for the whole runtime was being imported as a karaoke lyric video purely on its file extension, which switched off separation, stems, the mixer, lyrics and scoring. Beltr now looks at the picture: if it never changes, the file is imported as audio and prepared like any other song.
v1.63.0
Your whole library, browsable on the TV itself
Apple TV and Google TV can browse everything: both native TV apps now open onto your library instead of a bare connect screen, with a poster grid and an A-Z rail, artists, albums, artist pages, song details, and search you can talk to using the remote’s microphone. The home screen fills with Recently Added, Favorites and Sung Tonight rather than sitting idle.
An on-stage transport: pause, skip and change key from the couch, with the remote’s play/pause and skip buttons wired up. The queue auto-advances and auto-plays, so a night runs itself once it is loaded. Karaoke video discs play on their own fullscreen transport, with the stem controls that do not apply hidden rather than dead. Both apps are rolling out through the App Store and Google Play.
A new pitch engine, in beta: Settings, under Party, has a Pitch detection row, Standard or Neural. Neural is a small AI model that tracks a voice more accurately in a noisy room, especially at the top and bottom of a range. It downloads about 4 MB the first time you pick it, and the change takes effect at once, mid-song if you like. Standard stays the default, and nothing is downloaded unless you ask for it.
No more phantom songs: if your music folder and Beltr’s own storage shared a drive, Beltr was scanning its own working files back into your library, as tracks called “vocals” and “no_vocals” by an artist called “stems”, alongside duplicated uploads. Beltr now skips its own folders entirely, and the setup wizard’s track count matches what a scan will actually add. A library on a USB stick or an exFAT drive also picks up a hidden ._ twin beside every file, courtesy of macOS; those were surfacing as pending songs that never prepared, and are skipped everywhere now.
Android Remote 1.2 catches up with iOS: the five-tab layout of Songs, Party, Sing, Queue and You, a Sing screen that changes with your role, reactions and shout-outs for everyone not holding the mic, search-first Songs with sorting, and the Beltr look throughout.
Fixes: the Play, Pause, Restart and Stop bar on the TV was parked over the lyrics for a whole song — it now appears only in Practice mode, and fades after a few seconds of stillness, returning on any keypress or mouse move. Collecting a support log on Mac or Linux no longer writes a harmless but alarming error into the log you are about to send.
v1.62.0
Beltr on your home server, on any chip. Your phone is the mic on every TV.
The container now runs on arm64: docker pull ghcr.io/casavargas/beltr gives you the right image on an Intel or AMD box, an Apple Silicon Mac under Docker Desktop or OrbStack, a Raspberry Pi 5 or an Ampere server. The NVIDIA and Intel GPU images stay x86. The container has a real home on the site now: a Self-hosted card on the download page and beltr.app/selfhost with the pull command, the compose file, the Unraid steps and an honest note on Apple Silicon, where separation runs on the CPU inside the container: about 2 minutes for a 3 minute song on an M4 mini, against 11 seconds in the native Mac app.
Apple TV and Android TV play the phone mic through the room: both native TV apps scored your voice but never played it, so “Sing on the TV” from a remote was silent. They now carry the same chain the web TV does, noise gate, compressor, feedback guard and per-phone volume, and a phone left on score-only still scores. Video sync on the TV boxes no longer compounds nudges or restarts the clip when you adjust it.
Phone remotes, iOS and Android: one Sing screen, three faces: the singer gets transport, key, guide vocal, live score and a real mic level meter; everyone else gets reactions and shout-outs instead of a transport they should not touch; CD+G discs get a Freestyle face with no phantom score. Songs is search first, with native search, sort by title, artist, recently added or duration, and slimmer rows. The nav is Songs, Party, Sing, Queue, You, with a now-playing strip that follows you to every tab. On iOS the scrubber seeked to 2:30 on every song because the app assumed five minutes, and the screen slept mid-song; both fixed. On Android the room-wide Mix and Effects settings are host-only and the app picks up the Beltr typefaces, colours and stage background. Both apps are rolling out through the App Store and Google Play.
Align music videos by ear: in the dashboard’s Video tab the preview plays with the song underneath, so a wrong offset is audible as an echo and you nudge until it collapses; a Re-align button re-runs the automatic match. Nudge from the phone remote’s video sync stepper while a video is up, or with [ and ] on the TV keyboard. Small drift is corrected by speeding the video up or down a few percent instead of a visible jump.
Fixes: transport keys on the TV keep working after you touch the tempo or Stage sliders, and two console errors on every dashboard load are gone.
v1.61.0
Bring stems you already have, and mix them one by one
Songs you have already split: if you have run a song through a stem separator yourself, Beltr no longer makes you do it again. Drop a StemDeck zip, or a loose set of files named song_vocals, song_drums, song_bass and so on, into Add Music. Beltr recognises the shape, imports them as a playable song and skips separation entirely, so a song that would have taken minutes to prepare is ready as fast as the files copy. Six parts, four, ten — whatever your separator gave you is what Beltr keeps.
Everything else carries on working: Beltr builds the ordinary vocals and instrumental pair underneath an imported song, so lyrics fetching, word alignment, scoring, key changes, AI mix, the exports and all four TV and phone apps treat it exactly like one Beltr separated itself.
A slider for every part: songs carrying more than the usual two parts get individual volume control, on the TV’s Stage panel and in the phone remote’s mixer sheet, so whoever is holding the remote can pull the guitar down without getting up. Songs with the classic vocals and instrumental pair keep the controls they have always had.
Play, Pause, Restart and Stop, on screen: Solo and Practice had keyboard-only transport behind a hint that faded after a few seconds, which is no use on a screen nobody is standing at. There is a permanent bar now, asked for by a theatre group running rehearsals off a second monitor.
A second TV no longer plays over the first: opening the TV view again on another screen correctly handed the room over, but the screen it took the room from carried on playing at full volume with nothing left that could stop it. It now stops, says what happened, and offers to reconnect.
The mic squeal in Solo and Practice is gone: the feedback guard — a highpass, a limiter and a howl watchdog — was only ever wired into the phone microphone path, so a laptop’s built-in mic sitting next to its own speakers went into a loop the first time it was switched on. The computer mic now runs through the same guard and is used for scoring rather than played back into the room. The start card that switches it on says “Start singing” rather than “Enable mic & start”, with a readable way past it and an explanation on the spot if the mic cannot be opened.
Libraries past 10,000 songs: a cap meant to protect the phone remote from oversized payloads had become the only source the whole songs list read from. On an 18,000-song library the count was wrong, paging stopped at row 10,000, and searching for a song past that point found nothing at all even though it was sitting in your library. Every row is reachable again.
Practice in the desktop app opened in your default web browser, in a window Beltr could not reach — starting one song with Play and another with Practice left both playing at once with no way to stop the first. Practice now uses the same window Play does.
Lyrics that were found but never timed now say so. Some songs only exist online as plain words with no timestamps, which meant nothing swept on the TV and the MP3+G export refused them, while the library row looked exactly like a fully timed song. That state is labelled on the row, so Sync Now is an obvious next step rather than a buried one.
A graphics card written off over a missing folder: a separation helper that died before it ever reached the GPU, because a folder it needed was not there, was recorded as proof that the card could not run the work. The mark survived restarts, so every song afterwards ran on the processor while the health check kept reporting the GPU as fine. Fixed at the cause, and existing installs clear the mark on this update. Settings also stops showing a card as active once the pack has been set aside for the session.
Thank you to StemDeck and the other stem separators whose exports Beltr now imports directly, and to the r/karaoke Discord: a room full of people building their own karaoke and audio tools and throwing half-formed ideas at each other until one of them is worth building. The full list of who Beltr owes is at beltr.app/acknowledgments.
v1.60.7
Bring your own instruments to MIDI karaoke
Your own sound banks: a MIDI or .kar karaoke file stores notes, not sound, and what those notes come out as is decided by a SoundFont bank. Beltr has always played them through the one it ships with; now you can add your own under Settings, Preparing songs, MIDI sound bank. In the desktop app a bank copies straight off your drive through the ordinary file picker — the good ones run to hundreds of megabytes and there is no sense uploading one to a program on the same computer — while a phone or a browser on your network uploads instead. The bank Beltr comes with is always there and cannot be removed.
It applies to MIDI songs you import from then on: songs already in your library keep the sound they were made with until you import them again.
.sf2 only: Beltr’s synthesiser cannot read the compressed .sf3 form, so one is turned away when you add it, with a note saying why, rather than installing cleanly and then failing every song. If you had already put an .sf3 into Beltr’s soundfonts folder by hand it was being picked up and every MIDI import failed; those are ignored now, and MIDI import works again.
Acknowledgments: Beltr stands on a lot of other people’s work and none of it was written down anywhere you could read it. Settings, About, Acknowledgments now lists the projects doing the heavy lifting, every third-party component Beltr ships, downloads or talks to, and the licence each one is used under — the same list is at beltr.app/acknowledgments. Thank you to r/karaoke, and to everyone in the Discord who files the bug reports nobody wants to write.
v1.60.6
The GPU pack works on Microsoft Store installs
The pack installed, then said your graphics card wasn’t there: on installs from the Microsoft Store, the GPU pack downloaded and set up correctly and then failed its own check with “found no usable GPU device — check that the graphics driver is installed and the card is visible to the system”. The driver was installed and the card was visible; separation quietly carried on using the processor. Windows gives Store apps a private copy of the folder Beltr keeps its downloads in while still showing the app the ordinary address for it — fine for files Beltr reads and writes, not fine for programs it has to run, and the GPU pack is a program. Beltr now uses the real address, so the pack starts. Nothing is downloaded again: your existing pack is already in the right place and works after this update. Only Microsoft Store installs were affected — downloads from beltr.app, Linux and macOS were never involved.
The music-video downloader lives in the same folder and was failing the same way on Store installs, down to reporting itself as installed. The same fix covers it.
When the pack really can’t run, it now says why: that one message stood in for three unrelated failures, and the cause it named — a missing graphics driver — was usually the wrong one. There are three messages now, for a pack that cannot start, a machine with nothing to accelerate with, and a driver that cannot run the work, and each says what to do about it. The support bundle also records your graphics card, its driver version and what the pack did on this machine, so sending one in answers the question instead of raising it.
v1.60.5
Songs you already have stop crowding “Not prepared yet”
The duplicate prompt finishes the job: importing a song Beltr suspected you already had offered Replace / Import anyway / Cancel, and whichever you picked, the music-folder row the file came from was never told what happened. It stayed un-prepared and re-offered the same choice on the next Prepare, so one “Prepare all” could fill that view with songs already in the library. All three answers now record what became of the file, and deleting that song later releases it to be imported again.
A library already in that state heals itself at the next start, linking a row only when its file is byte-for-byte identical to a song you have. Nothing on disk is touched.
Dismiss all: for what is left over — a rip at a different bitrate, a live version, the same song in two folders. Dismissed songs are listed under Settings, Library, can be brought back, and a rescan keeps them dismissed.
Music-video backgrounds: fetching a video takes yt-dlp plus the JavaScript runtime it now depends on, and Beltr installs both for you. It was counting a runtime too old for yt-dlp to use as one that works, so Settings said the pair was ready and no video ever arrived. A runtime yt-dlp would refuse now counts as missing, and the install button fetches one that works. If your machine has Node.js 18 or 20 on it, that was the trap.
For self-hosters: the container image carried exactly such a runtime, so music videos never downloaded inside it. It has been taken out of the image — both halves come from the install button and land in the cache that survives an image update — and the Unraid guide has been corrected.
v1.60.4
Lyrics in time, and Beltr behind your own address
Timings nobody could sing are now refused: a ten-word line stamped to last a third of a second is not something a person gets through, and a song built out of those lines played thirty seconds out of step with no fault anywhere in Beltr. It now checks the timing grid for impossible lines and turns that record down rather than playing it. The words are kept and re-timed against your own audio instead of being thrown away.
Beltr picks the cut of the song you have: a radio edit and an album version can be seconds apart and look identical on paper, which was enough to start a whole song early. When the timings do not line up with where the vocals actually are in your file, Beltr looks again and takes the version that does. A library already carrying bad timings heals itself the next time you play the song — and lyrics you corrected by hand, or timings that came from a MIDI or CD+G file or from Beltr’s own transcription, are never touched.
Running Beltr behind your own address: hosts putting Beltr behind nginx, Caddy, Traefik or Tailscale Serve had no way to say so. The TV screen no longer meets a login form when a password is set — gating it locked out the one client that cannot type into a login box, while the TV apps walked straight past it; the dashboard and every management page stay behind the password. The join code now points at an address a phone can actually reach, rather than a local one that is unusable to a guest outside the house. And there is a written guide for it: what a proxy has to forward, why the phone microphones need HTTPS, which pages are open, and why stacking the proxy’s own login in front of Beltr breaks the remotes.
On the TV: Disc Glow-Up only appears on CD+G discs now, having sat in the stage menu for every song while doing nothing on any of them, and Clean mode says what it turns off in a line under the switch — readable from the couch rather than hidden behind a mouse hover on a screen with no mouse.
In the next TV and phone app updates: these ship with the Apple TV, Google TV and phone remote apps rather than with the desktop installer. A full https address works anywhere you can type one, with no port number, while a plain local address still means http on port 8000 and saved hosts keep working. A typed hostname assumes https, matching the web remote, so a guest joining from outside the house no longer fails on a redirect. And cover art on Apple TV matches the desktop app for songs with no artwork of their own.
v1.60.3
Thousands of songs stop dragging
Big libraries feel like small ones: every list that could show your whole library used to build your whole library, every time, on every device. The dashboard, the phone remote and the TV idle screen now render only the rows that fit on screen — an 18,000-song library was laying out 18,000 rows synchronously each time a list opened. The library is also fetched in pages and only when it has actually changed: the dashboard asks a cheap “has anything changed?” question instead of re-downloading the catalogue, and the server answers repeat requests from a cache rather than rebuilding and re-compressing the same 8.6 MB. Serving one of those went from about 95 ms of server time to under 1. Nothing about what you see changes; how long you wait for it does.
The show could restart itself: when a song ended, a timer was set for the score and voting screens and nothing cancelled it if the next song started first. With Auto-DJ picking immediately, that timer fired underneath the song already playing and skipped past it, seconds in. It is now cancelled by whatever loads next.
Cover art belonging to another record: the artwork services rank results rather than filter them, so they answer every query with something, and Beltr took the first answer on trust and then cached it. Each candidate is now checked against the song it is for, and a lookup needs both a title and an artist before it will guess at all. Artwork already embedded in your file is unaffected and still used first.
Play/pause needed several presses: the dashboard’s button was being rebuilt ten times a second by the stream of playback updates from the TV, and a normal-length mouse press usually landed in the gap. Measured against a real session, 12 presses used to produce 0 changes and now produce 12. The stage also says what it can do at last: the space bar has always toggled playback, the arrows have always seeked and the bar along the bottom has always been draggable, and a quiet line above the bar now names all three. It appears when someone moves a mouse or presses one of those keys and fades again after a few seconds, so a TV nobody is standing at never shows it.
Back, in the desktop app: the library has always been a real set of pages, but the desktop app draws no browser chrome, so there was no way back from an artist, album, genre or playlist without starting over. There is now a Back control at the left of the title bar, a chevron on each of those pages, a View menu entry, and the mouse back button on Windows.
Settings tells the truth: Beltr has two scoring engines and picks between them per song, and each had its own control — so “Scoring style” did nothing at all on a normally prepared library, and which one you were adjusting depended on the song. Scoring difficulty is now the single control and the other engine follows it. Party mode’s description credited its presets with scoring behaviour they never applied and attached the turn-taking claim to the wrong preset; each preset now names the queue mode and theme it actually sets, and the “Custom” card, which was never stored and so only looked like it worked, is gone. The data folder path is readable rather than pinned to 130 pixels showing you the useless half.
A run of fixes underneath: lyric lines stopped going missing where the aligner could not place a passage, and hand-edited word timings survive three paths that used to overwrite them; imported karaoke videos and CD+G discs play at full brightness; “N need review” leads to the Replace / Keep both / Skip prompt instead of silently dropping those tracks; a song that finishes with no lyrics says so and offers Add lyrics rather than announcing itself as ready; Delete names the song and lists exactly what goes and what stays; MP3+G zips with same-named tracks in different folders stop overwriting each other; phones and the party preset survive a restart, and a reconnecting host keeps their controls; separation no longer races itself at launch or strands a song as “resumable” forever; and the desktop app recovers from a backend crash instead of never seeing itself as healthy again.
Older graphics cards fail honestly: some advertise acceleration, set up successfully, then fail on the first real operation — so the pack read as healthy while every separation crashed and silently redid the work on the processor. Beltr now runs a tiny test computation through each option and checks the answer before trusting it, and says the driver is too old for the pack rather than failing song after song.
For self-hosters: separation is faster on processor-only machines, which is the container default — a 144-second song went from 48.3 to 41.1 seconds, with equivalent output. A CPU-limited container sizes its threads correctly now, instead of reading a 16-core host and fighting itself under a 4-CPU cap. One slow file no longer freezes every connected device: eight paths ran blocking work inside the server’s event loop, including uploads, MP3+G import and export, and a disk-space check a hung network mount could stall outright. The support bundle reports library size and shape, storage layout, and slow requests, all in one timezone.
Removed: the Classic dashboard theme, which had become the reason simple things needed two implementations — the Command Deck layout is the dashboard now. And “Paste a song list” in Add Music, along with the Wanted list only it could fill; pointing Beltr at a folder does the same job without typing song names. Nothing you already imported is affected.
v1.60.2
Word alignment stops eating memory, and a correction
Alignment on a long passage used to need up to 17 GB: working out when each word is sung runs the vocal track through a speech model, and Beltr fed it whole passages of singing at once. The model’s memory grows with the square of the passage length — 30 seconds needs about 1.3 GB, two minutes nearly 9, a three-minute stretch of uninterrupted singing about 17 — and the inference library never hands it back. On a self-hosted container with a memory limit that was a kill with nothing in the log; on a desktop, a stall of several minutes on a song that then looked normal. Alignment now runs in 20-second windows stitched back together exactly, and stays around 1.3 GB however long the song. A real three-minute passage that used to run three and a half minutes before being killed now takes 8 seconds. Accuracy is unchanged, checked word by word against hand-verified timings, and songs with line-timed lyrics take the same path they always did.
A correction to v1.60.1: that release said the Intel container needs about 10 GB because integrated graphics borrows from the container’s memory, and added a startup warning saying so. That was wrong — the kills it was written for were the alignment fault above, which has nothing to do with the GPU. The 10 GB figure and the Intel-specific warning are withdrawn; the Intel image shares the plain image’s guidance. What v1.60.1 got right stays: the support bundle’s memory history that survives a restart and the startup line that says when the previous run was killed are what made the real cause findable.
v1.60.1
The Intel container gets its memory right
The Intel container needs more memory than we told you(withdrawn in v1.60.2 — see above): v1.60.0 introduced the Intel build (latest-openvino) and our documentation gave it the same memory figure as the plain build. That was wrong, and in the wrong direction — integrated Intel graphics has no memory of its own, so it borrows from the same pool the container is limited to, and the graphics work adds to what Beltr needs rather than taking the load off it. Give it about 10 GB. Beltr now says so at startup when it has less, instead of applying the plain build’s lower figure and staying quiet. The NVIDIA build is unaffected: a graphics card really does have its own memory.
Beltr lets go of the separation model between songs: it kept the model loaded for 60 seconds so the next song could start faster, but during a large import songs finish about every 55 seconds — so that timer never fired and the model stayed loaded for the entire run. In a container with a memory limit, it now releases after 10 seconds. Two new advanced settings in the Unraid template let you tune this and the graphics driver by hand, alongside the existing GPU precision setting, which halves what the Intel GPU holds when set to FP16.
When Beltr is killed for memory, it now says so: a container stopped for running out of memory gets no chance to write anything down, so it looks identical to a crash or to nothing at all — songs stop finishing and the log restarts mid-sentence. Beltr now reports at the next startup that the previous run was killed, and how close it came to the limit.
The support bundle remembers across a restart: its memory figures came from the system, and the system forgets them the moment the container restarts — so a bundle sent after the fact reported a healthy, freshly-started container every time. It now keeps its own record of what the previous run actually used.
v1.60.0
A new engine: leaner, faster, and on more GPUs
A leaner install: every installer shed the machine-learning framework the old engine depended on. The macOS download is 410 MB (was 705), Windows 395 MB (was 674), Linux 402 MB (was 682); installed, the Mac app goes from 1.6 GB to 813 MB. The optional NVIDIA acceleration pack is about 2 GB instead of 4, and the new AMD/Intel pack for Windows is under 30 MB.
Faster separation on every accelerated machine: Apple Silicon Macs separate a song about 1.5x faster than v1.59 while using 40% less memory — a four-minute song in about 12 seconds on an M2 Pro. NVIDIA cards are about 1.8x faster, the same song in around 6 seconds on an RTX 3060. Windows machines with AMD or Intel graphics, which used to do all the work on the processor, are now accelerated too.
More GPUs do the work: on Windows, AMD and Intel graphics are accelerated through a new DirectML pack — the GPU dialog in Settings used to call those cards “Unavailable”, and now offers the pack. For self-hosters, the container gains an Intel build (latest-openvino, Beltr-Intel in Unraid Community Applications) that runs separation on the integrated GPU inside most Intel home-server processors, alongside the existing NVIDIA build.
What changed underneath: separation runs on MDX-Net, an openly licensed model, through ONNX Runtime, with output quality on par with before. Word timing is the same aligner rebuilt on ONNX Runtime and produces identical timings, so prepared songs are untouched. The opt-in local lyrics transcription moved to NVIDIA’s Parakeet model: considerably faster on a CPU, and a 620 MB download instead of 1.5 GB. Every model Beltr downloads is now pinned and checksum-verified before use.
Things to know: machines with no GPU at all separate more slowly than before — the new model is heavier on a processor, by roughly 1.7x, so a four-minute song that took about a minute takes closer to two. If you have any GPU, including integrated Intel or AMD graphics on Windows, install the pack from Settings and you come out well ahead. The optional “high quality” separation tier is gone; it depended on the framework that left the installer and was only ever available with an NVIDIA pack. Your library carries over untouched, and the first separation after updating downloads the new model files (about 360 MB).
v1.59.3
The visualizer moves with the music
A new visualizer: all five looks (Aurora, Bars, Wave, Radial, Particles) were rewritten to read the beat rather than the volume, so they move with the song instead of flickering at it. The picker now shows a small drawing of each look, the way the theme picker shows swatches. Intensity is a single honest control and is remembered. On a slow TV the visualizer halves its own frame rate rather than stealing frames from the lyrics. Imported CD+G discs feed it now too — they used to leave it reacting to silence.
Turning it off actually turns it off: picking “None” used to leave the last frame frozen on screen until the song ended, and the choice didn’t survive a restart. Both fixed. The looks were also far dimmer than the slider suggested, because three separate settings multiplied together behind it — the slider is now the only thing between the visualizer and the glass, so expect it considerably brighter at the same setting.
A “Not prepared yet” list in your library: connect a 400-song folder, prepare a handful, and the other 390 are one click away in the sidebar, newest first. It answers “what did I just add that still needs preparing?”, which neither Recently Added nor Preparing could.
Music videos appear mid-song: a video that finishes downloading, gets uploaded, or is picked by hand while a song is already playing now swaps in on its own, and deleting one removes it just as promptly. Flipping the music-video switch mid-song also loads the video instead of only revealing it — previously that showed nothing at all unless you cycled backgrounds off and on.
The music-video downloader row in Settings works and tells the truth: on a fast machine, mostly the desktop app, the row rendered a title and nothing else — no status, no install button, no instructions. It now fills in reliably. It also stops claiming videos download automatically when your own settings say otherwise, and offers a “Turn them on” button right there instead of pointing at a switch eight rows up the page.
Phones with no microphone access get a way out: a browser refuses mic access on a plain http:// address, which is exactly what a self-hosted Beltr on your network is. That note now points at the free Beltr Remote app, which captures through the phone itself and isn’t subject to the rule. iPhones were always affected too; the old note implied otherwise.
“How do you want to sing?” now reaches your phone: on a PC-plugged-into-TV setup, answering that question used to mean walking to the computer. It appears on every connected phone as well, and whichever surface answers first wins. The TV also gains an elapsed / total timer beside the now-playing card.
A run of smaller fixes: guide notes stop appearing during instrumental passages where a loud guitar was being mistaken for a voice; songs started from the dashboard are no longer credited to a singer called “Dashboard”; a deleted song from a connected folder can be prepared again instead of stranding the file; the “ready” toast says so when lyrics are still loading; the mic volume slider on the Stage panel no longer accepts drags it ignores and snaps back to 75%; the lobby stops showing the same prompt twice in a row and shoving the layout down when one wraps; and one late step of lyric timing that had slipped out of v1.59.2’s memory gate is back inside it, so more large imports survive on machines without a graphics card.
v1.59.2
Big imports stop eating themselves
Songs stop failing for no reason during big imports: on a machine with no graphics card — most self-hosted containers, and plenty of desktops — Beltr was starting the next song’s separation while still finishing the previous song’s lyrics and analysis. With a graphics card those use separate memory; without one they collide, and on a machine with a memory limit the system killed the work outright — no error, just a song that never finished. Beltr now keeps them apart automatically wherever that’s needed. Nothing to configure.
Beltr tells you when it hasn’t been given enough memory: a container killed for running out of memory leaves nothing behind to explain itself. Beltr now reads the limit it’s been given, reports it at startup, and says plainly when it’s too low — while there’s still something in the log to read.
The support bundle now includes memory diagnostics: limit, current usage, and the highest point usage ever reached, so a bundle taken after the fact still shows how close things came. Previously it had nothing about memory at all.
Much quieter logs: one song’s audio analysis could write tens of thousands of lines of third-party chatter, burying everything worth reading and writing steadily to disk — unwelcome on a NAS. Beltr’s own messages are unchanged; the noise around them is gone.
v1.59.1
The score screen tells the truth
The score screen stops contradicting itself: the star rating now comes from the same accuracy the letter grade does, so four stars can’t sit beside a D. The giant grade letter clears when the turn actually ends instead of lingering over the start of the next song. And a session with nobody else in the room no longer runs a full audience vote and announces a verdict nobody cast.
Phones now say why the microphone isn’t available: browsers refuse mic access outright on a plain http:// address — exactly what a self-hosted Beltr on your own network is. The explanation Beltr had written for that was never once shown; phones and TVs just failed silently. It now appears.
“Get Support Bundle” works outside the desktop app: the button in Settings → About was only wired up inside the desktop app. In a browser it looked normal and did nothing at all — a bad thing to find while you’re trying to report a problem. It now downloads the same diagnostics file everywhere.
Unraid’s WebUI button opens the dashboard, not the TV: if you added the container by hand, with docker-compose, or Unraid picked it up on its own, that button had no path to open and landed on the lyrics screen. It now opens the dashboard, and so does the bare server address. Nothing needs re-creating.
v1.59.0
The party gets a front door
Beltr now has a Discord: come hang out with other hosts — swap setups, ask questions, and hear about releases first. Join buttons live where they make sense (end of setup, end of the tour, the tray menu, Settings), and beltr.app/discord always points at the current invite.
Setup tells the story first: before asking you to configure anything, setup now shows what Beltr actually does — how any song becomes karaoke on your TV, and how everyone’s phone becomes a remote. If you’ve already set Beltr up, you’ll see the new intro once after updating; your settings are untouched.
Music-video resolution you can actually pick: the old slider offered heights YouTube never serves. It’s now a simple choice — 480p, 720p, or 1080p — and the default stays 720p.
Beltr is on Unraid Community Applications: search “Beltr” in CA and install — CPU or NVIDIA GPU flavor. If you installed from the earlier template, re-add it from CA once so future template updates reach you.
The groundwork for more languages: Settings → Appearance gains a language choice, and the machinery underneath can now translate every screen. English is complete; the first Japanese strings are in as proof.
For the tinkerers: opt-in separation tuning for self-hosted installs (BELTR_DEMUCS_OVERLAP, BELTR_DEMUCS_SEGMENT) — measurably faster processing on CPU, and nothing changes unless you set them.
The GPU pack on Windows now repairs itself: a rare Windows setup could stop the GPU pack from even starting, and Beltr used to blame the wrong thing for it. It now identifies the exact missing piece, supplies it from the app itself, and rechecks, automatically.
Docker “edge” tags actually move now: self-hosters tracking edge or edge-cuda were silently pinned to an old build while being told they were up to date. Every release refreshes them — and the cuda tag works for the first time.
v1.58.0
Every setting, one screen
A Settings screen worthy of the name: everything in one screen, organized into sections, each setting explained in the words you’d use on the couch — and a filter box that searches all of it. What used to be scattered across panels and menus now has one look: every on/off is a real switch, every choice is a dropdown, and anything destructive asks first.
Your choices follow the party, not the browser: how lyrics scroll, how strict scoring is, the visualizer, backgrounds and clean lyrics are now saved with Beltr itself and applied the moment the big screen opens — on every TV, after every restart. Some of these used to live quietly in one browser’s memory and silently reset anywhere else.
Saved takes, managed: every take Beltr records now remembers the song, the artist and who sang it, and a new manager in Settings plays takes back, shares, downloads or deletes them — with how much space they use in plain sight. A new Keep takes for rule can keep only the newest so many, or only the last so many days — and before you agree, Beltr counts exactly how many saved takes would fall outside the rule and tells you. Nothing is deleted at the moment you save it; trimming happens as new takes are recorded.
Music videos under your control: a new manager lists every downloaded music video and the space it uses, and lets you replace, remove or search again for any one — including clearing the “no video found” marks so Beltr will look again. Pick how sure Beltr must be before fetching a video automatically (Strict — official music videos only, Balanced, or Loose), choose the resolution from 480p up to 1080p, or turn automatic fetching off entirely and keep picking them by hand.
The music-video helper installs everything it needs: fetching music videos takes a free helper tool plus a small runtime it depends on; having one without the other looked healthy and then failed every download with no explanation. The one-button install in Settings now sets up both, checked and verified — and if your machine already has them, Beltr uses your copies and downloads nothing.
Star ratings from phones count again: rating a performance from the remote sometimes never reached the TV. It does now. Includes everything from v1.57.9.
v1.57.9
When the words arrive early, Beltr fixes it
Lyrics that arrive early are pulled back into time with the song: Beltr fetches synced lyrics from a public database, and occasionally the entry it finds was timed against a different cut of the recording — a slightly longer intro, a different edit. Everything then arrives early by the same few seconds: the line changes before the vocal, the highlight sweeps a word you haven’t reached yet, and there is nothing you can do about it from the couch. Nothing in Beltr could spot this before, because the mistake is invisible to every check worth making: the track lengths agree, the words are right, and they are all in the right order. Beltr now listens to the vocal itself before it trusts the timings, works out how far out they are, and moves the whole lyric onto the singing. On the song that prompted this, the words were arriving three and a half seconds early — a beat and a half ahead of Justin Bieber — and now land within a quarter of a second.
A song is only ever moved when the evidence is overwhelming: the correction runs on every song, so it also has to know when to do nothing at all. It only moves a lyric when most of the song’s lines independently agree on the same shift, by an amount large enough to be real rather than measurement noise. Across a thirty-song test library, twenty-nine were left exactly as they were. Songs you prepare from now on get this automatically; a song already in your library keeps the timing it was prepared with. Includes everything from v1.57.8.
v1.57.8
Your own web address, and the newest graphics cards
The big screen shows an address phones can actually reach: if you put Beltr behind your own web address — a reverse proxy like nginx, or any tunnel that isn’t Cloudflare’s — the big screen ignored it and printed your home network address instead, on screen and inside the QR code. Anyone joining from outside the house scanned a link that could never connect. The big screen now keeps the address it was itself reached on, which is by definition one that works.
You can tell Beltr your own address: Settings → Remote access has a new choice, Reverse proxy / my own address, for anyone already publishing Beltr themselves. Beltr starts nothing extra — it simply puts that address on the TV and in the QR code in place of the local one. Until now the entire setting was greyed out unless you had Cloudflare’s cloudflared installed, which is precisely the software this kind of setup does not use.
Graphics acceleration is built for the newest NVIDIA cards: the optional speed-up download was built against a version of CUDA that predates the RTX 50-series, so on those cards it installed perfectly, reported itself ready, and then fell back to the processor the moment it was asked to do any work — separation ran at CPU speed with no explanation. It is now built against CUDA 12.8, which covers those cards.
“Needs repair” now says what needs repairing: when the graphics speed-up was installed but not working, that phrase was the whole message, and the real reason only ever reached the log file. Beltr now tells you what actually went wrong — including the one case reinstalling can never fix, where the card is simply newer than the download was built for. Includes everything from v1.57.7.
v1.57.7
The pitch bar stops vanishing when you skip
The pitch bar survives skipping around a song: dragging the bar along the bottom of the TV to jump back to a chorus wiped the scrolling note guide off the screen, and nothing brought it back — the rest of the song played with an empty strip where the notes should have been, and only starting the song over restored it. Scoring stopped at the same instant and for the same reason: the notes it grades you against had been thrown away along with the ones on screen, so it went on quietly awarding nothing. Skipping now leaves both where they are.
Skipping back lets you sing a part again for a score: jumping with the arrow keys, or with rewind and skip-forward on a phone, left scoring parked where you had already got to, so anything you re-sang counted for nothing. Only the bar along the bottom of the TV had ever rewound it. All three do now. Includes everything from v1.57.6.
v1.57.6
Music videos actually show up
Music videos that never showed up, now do: Beltr plays a song’s official music video on the TV, dimmed behind the words. If you added songs before installing yt-dlp — the free tool that fetches them — Beltr recorded “no music video” against every one of them, a verdict it had no business reaching, because without the tool it could not search at all. The mark was permanent, so installing yt-dlp afterwards changed nothing. Beltr no longer records that verdict when it had no way to look, and it re-checks the songs already carrying it, once, quietly in the background.
Pick the music video yourself: every song’s Video tab now has Find on YouTube. Search, see the candidates with their length next to your song’s so you can tell the album cut from the radio edit, and choose the one you want.
Beltr tells you what music videos need: they are fetched using yt-dlp, a free open-source tool we do not bundle. When it is missing, the Video tab now says so and points you at the install steps instead of quietly showing nothing. And when Beltr searched but found nothing it was confident was the real music video, the tab tells you that too, rather than sitting empty in a way that looks broken.
Sing Solo and Party are two doors, not one button: they were a single amber pill with a hairline seam down the middle, so someone sitting alone at the computer still had to work out that the left half was meant for them. They are two separate tiles now, each with its own look and a line underneath saying what that door asks of you — NO PHONE NEEDED against PHONES JOIN BY QR.
Opening the big screen no longer closes the one already open: asking for the big screen while one was running shut down the screen the party was watching, and in the desktop app the replacement opened in your web browser instead of Beltr’s own window. Beltr now tells you which room is already open and asks first. Includes everything from v1.57.5.
v1.57.5
Sing on your own, no phone required
Sing Solo is its own way in: the one big button used to say “Open Big Screen”, and the big screen answered with a QR code and “ENTER CODE” — so on your own at your computer, Beltr looked like a party you needed a phone to get into. The main button is now two: Sing Solo puts you straight into singing on the computer you are sitting at, and Party opens the big screen with the room code for phones to join, exactly as before.
A song picker that opens on “What do you want to sing?”: Sing Solo brings up a search box over your library — the songs you have sung recently first, then everything else, with artwork, and a green dot on anything ready to sing right now. Type a few letters, press Enter, and it starts. It is on the command palette too: ⌘K, or Ctrl+K, then “sing solo”.
One Sing button, where you are already looking: the big screen button had drifted up into the title bar while the middle of the dashboard grew a second button that did the same thing. There is one control now, in the middle where the eye lands; the title bar keeps the room code and Settings.
Progress that follows the whole batch, not one song: import thirteen songs and the bar used to climb to about half, jump back to the start for the next song, and do it again — it could never fill. It now counts across the whole import (“Song 7 of 13”), only moves forward, and the time left covers the songs still waiting. Add more songs mid-import and it widens instead of going backward.
The progress bar reaches the end: on computers with graphics acceleration, every step after vocal separation was still timed by generic guesses that ran about three times long, so “Separating vocals” finished barely a third of the way across and the first estimate opened at around three minutes for a song that took well under two. Those steps are now measured against your actual machine. The bar also never got drawn full — it vanished the instant it arrived at 100% — and now holds the finished frame for a beat, the way the TV already did. Includes everything from v1.57.0.
v1.57.0
Beltr tells you when a song is ready
Beltr tells you when a song is ready: the moment a song finishes, a message appears wherever you are in the app, with Play and Add to queue right there in it. Get several ready at once and it says so in a single line instead of stacking up messages.
A “Ready to sing” list that waits for you: songs that just finished now gather at the top of the Preparing screen with their Play button, instead of disappearing the second they were done. They stay until you play them, queue them, or clear the list, and the sidebar keeps a count. You can walk away and pick up where you left off.
Queue a song before it is ready: any song waiting to be prepared now offers “Prepare and queue” alongside “Prepare only”, so you can line up a singer’s pick while the vocals are still being separated.
One word for one thing: Beltr used to say “prepare” in some places and “process” in others for the same job. It says prepare everywhere now, on the desktop app, the TV and your phone. A song already in your library and a song in a connected folder show the same two buttons, because they do the same thing.
Paid licenses stop falling back to the trial: if your computer’s name on the network changed, Beltr could forget it had been paid for and quietly drop back to trial limits. It now recognizes your license across that change, so you will not have to re-enter your key.
The TV stops covering a song that is already playing: the “Setting the stage” screen could get stuck on top of a song that had already started, and stay there. Includes everything from v1.56.0.
v1.56.0
A progress bar you can trust
Honest progress, on every screen: the bar that fills while Beltr separates vocals and syncs lyrics used to be a rough guess that jumped, stalled and disagreed from screen to screen. It’s now one honest number — the fill and the percentage are the same figure — with a live “time left” that learns how fast your computer actually is as it goes. The dashboard, the TV and the phones all tell the same story.
A “Now Processing” spotlight on the dashboard: the song currently being prepared gets its own card up top, its waveform filling in as the work completes, so a batch import is something you can watch instead of guess at.
Music videos play behind your lyrics, automatically: if you have yt-dlp installed on your computer, Beltr now finds the official music video for a song and plays it behind the words on the TV — no buttons, no setup. We don’t bundle yt-dlp; it’s a free tool you can add if you want this.
The first-run download shows real progress: when Beltr downloads its separation model on first launch, the splash screen now fills a real progress bar instead of spinning with no end in sight.
Beltr follows your TV across screens: on the desktop app, a display you connect after opening Beltr — like turning on an AirPlay screen — is now picked up, and when a screen is labeled as your TV, the big screen opens there.
MIDI and Thai karaoke files import cleanly: .kar files saved in UTF-16 now come through with the right characters instead of gibberish, Japanese furigana reading-aids no longer clutter the lines, and every MIDI import now tells you what it did — or, if it couldn’t, exactly why. Includes everything from v1.55.9.
v1.55.9
A calmer dashboard, one set of buttons
A calmer dashboard background: the dashboard sat on a warm, faintly brown wash with a glow that stayed lit even when nothing was playing, so it competed with your library for attention. The background is now a cool, deep-dark ground, and its warm glow appears only while a song is playing — drawn from that song’s own artwork. When nothing’s playing the screen stays quiet and your library leads.
Buttons look like one set now: across the dashboard, Settings and a song’s detail panel, buttons had drifted apart — the same kind of action wore different sizes and corners, and two slightly different reds stood in for the same “danger” — so the app looked unfinished. They are one consistent system now, and Reset and Delete, which used to read as plain text until you hovered them, look like the buttons they are.
The Lyrics tab is easier to read: the timestamps, the scroll-mode label and the “click a line to jump” hint were too faint to read against the background, and the toolbar rows were spaced unevenly. All bumped to readable and evened out.
Artwork corners are clean: on album tiles and the artist/album detail header, a faint background gradient showed through the four rounded corners of the art. The corners now clip cleanly to the artwork.
The detail-page header sits on the page: the artist, album, genre and playlist header looked like a separate glass card floating over the page; the art, title and buttons now sit directly on the background. Plus a keyboard fix: the party-mode preset picker can now be opened from the keyboard. Includes everything from v1.55.8.
v1.55.8
Japanese and Chinese libraries, in reading order
Japanese and Chinese titles sort and search by their reading: a CJK library browsed in an order that looked arbitrary, because names were ordered by their underlying character codes rather than by how they are read — 米津玄師 belongs under よ, not wherever its kanji happen to fall. Beltr now reads the sort tag your tagger already writes into the file, and the one Music.app keeps in an exported library, and orders artists, albums and titles by that reading — in the browse grids and the song list alike, which until now disagreed with each other. Search matches the reading too, so typing kana finds a title written in kanji, and halfwidth, fullwidth, katakana and hiragana all match one another. Anything without a reading falls back to its display name, so a mixed library stays in one coherent order.
Album art lines up down the library: songs that had not been prepared yet sat with their artwork slightly left of every prepared song’s, so the column of thumbnails visibly stepped in and out wherever the two kinds of row met. Every row now shares the same edge.
Artist photos are fetched once per computer, not once per library: portraits were stored next to whichever library was open, so pointing Beltr at a different music folder, or moving your data folder, made it download the same faces from scratch all over again. They now sit with the rest of the app’s machine-level cache and are reused by every library on that computer. Photos you already have are carried across on first launch rather than abandoned, and a portrait you picked yourself now follows you through a data-folder change. Includes everything from v1.55.7.
v1.55.7
The right face on every artist
Every artist resolves to their own portrait: a shelf of well-known names — Coldplay, Ed Sheeran, Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, Radiohead, The Weeknd, U2 and more — came up as blank silhouettes even though real photos exist, because a look-alike account was picked ahead of the real artist. Bands with an “&” or comma — Earth, Wind & Fire, Hall & Oates, Simon & Garfunkel, Crosby, Stills & Nash — could even show a confident photo of the wrong musician. The library now finds the real artist, and never invents one for a band it cannot place.
Keyboard hints match your keyboard: on Windows and Linux the app printed the Mac ⌘ symbol in the search hint and a couple of buttons, pointing at a key you do not have — the shortcuts themselves already worked with Ctrl. They now read Ctrl on Windows and Linux and ⌘ on a Mac.
Karaoke videos stop asking to be imported again: an imported karaoke video carries its own lyrics and backing track, but the app kept filing it under “In progress” and offering to resume importing it on every launch. It is now marked ready the moment it lands, the way MP3+G discs already are. Includes everything from v1.55.6.
v1.55.6
The player window sees itself out
The player closes itself when nothing else is queued: picking a single song from the dashboard opened a player that had nowhere to go once the song ended — it paused, cleared the screen and then sat there until you tracked the window down. It now shows a short “Nothing else queued” card and hands you back to the dashboard, with a Stay here button if you would rather keep the screen up. Open the big screen for a party and it keeps its room code exactly as before, and it never closes itself while a phone is connected.
The big screen opens on your second screen: with a TV or second monitor attached, the player opens full screen there instead of covering the dashboard you are picking songs from. With one screen, nothing changes.
The dashboard’s idle panel is now a join strip: the large panel that filled the space when nothing was playing is now a single compact row with the room code and join address, so your library starts higher up the screen.
“Recently Added” is no longer cut short: once a library ran to four figures, the song count pushed the longest label in the sidebar out of its box and it rendered as “Recently Ad…”. Includes everything from v1.55.5.
v1.55.5
Batch imports finish on any machine
Importing a batch no longer stops after the first song: on a computer without a supported graphics card, song two failed outright with a threading error and everything queued behind it was lost. Separation on those machines also runs in about a third less memory now, which is the difference between finishing and failing on an 8 GB laptop.
A song no longer replays after it finishes: starting one from a phone’s Play now, the dashboard buttons, an album Play all or an Auto‑DJ pick left it sitting in the queue, so the queue found it still waiting and played it again.
One TV background at a time: the music video, artist photo and blurred album art were all drawn at once, stacked. The music-video toggle is now the chooser it always looked like — on gives the video with the stills as fallback, off gives the still.
Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Thai and Greek come through readable: Cyrillic karaoke files had no matching character set and always decoded to mojibake, and burned MP3+G discs in these scripts came out as empty boxes because the disc exporter never got the fonts the TV did. Both are fixed.
Plus a size ceiling that rejects corrupt MIDI files, and generic placeholders in the export preview. Includes everything from v1.55.4.
v1.55.4
Windows updates install again
Updating no longer dead-ends on “Beltr cannot be closed”: the dialog asked you to close an app that was not running, and Retry never helped, so you stayed on the old version however many times you tried. Installing this update repairs the stuck install on the way through, so later updates stay clear.
Burned discs carry your hand-tapped word timings: words you re-tapped in the word timing editor never reached the export, which read only the automatic aligner’s output. They carry through now.
Exported MP3s report the right duration: every export was missing the header players rely on to show length and to seek accurately.
Plus the update notice moved from a full-width banner to a small chip in the header. Includes everything from v1.55.3.
v1.55.3
Lyrics that keep up
The word highlight always finishes its line: three timing bugs could stall the karaoke sweep partway through a line and make it jump — word timings landing past the line change, breaths and quiet held notes freezing the highlight, and good alignments thrown away over one unverified word. All three are fixed.
Ping-pong lyric layouts: a new per-song display option keeps two or four fixed rows on screen and replaces each sung line in place instead of scrolling, so fast, lyric-dense tracks stay readable. Pick it per song; the TV switches live.
A word timing editor: open a song’s Lyrics tab in the dashboard and tap the spacebar along with each word, drag or nudge individual words, or spread a line evenly. Hand-timed words survive re-alignment and lyric corrections.
Plus a fix for dashboard confirmation dialogs crashing before they could open. Includes everything from v1.55.2.
v1.55.2
MIDI karaoke, in and out
Import .mid, .kar and Thai NCN songs: classic MIDI karaoke files now come in as first-class songs. Beltr renders the audio at import with a bundled synthesizer — the melody channel becomes the guide vocal, everything else becomes the instrumental — so the mixer, synced lyrics and pitch scoring all work exactly as they do for separated audio. Lyrics and note timing land perfectly synced straight from the file, and legacy Thai, Japanese and Chinese lyric encodings are detected automatically. Rolling out on macOS first; Windows and Linux pick it up in an upcoming update.
Export any song as .kar: guide melody plus synced lyrics in a file classic karaoke players understand, from the same Export dialog as every other format.
Thai and CJK, first-class: bundled fonts for Thai, Chinese, Japanese and Korean on both the TV and the phone remote, with script-aware search, artist matching and lyric handling to match.
Plus one shared Beltr-styled dialog across the dashboard and remote in place of browser popups, a dashboard that settles into a single surface with the room code as a title-bar join chip, and a fix for Windows updates dead-ending on long install paths. Includes everything from v1.55.1.
v1.55.1
A smoother Windows update
No more “Beltr cannot be closed”: the Windows installer now detects a running Beltr precisely and shuts down the background audio server itself — including after a crash, or when the app was only closed to the tray — so installs, updates and uninstalls proceed without the dead-end dialog. Includes everything from v1.55.0.
v1.55.0
Meet Command Deck
A rebuilt dashboard shell: a slim title bar, an icon rail, and a single-surface sidebar with your library navigation and the room card, which stays quiet until a room is live and then lights up with the code. Settings is a full routed screen with sections and instant search, a ⌘K command palette reaches everything, the queue slides in as an overlay dock, and songs without artwork get generated covers instead of gray boxes.
A live Processing view: everything Beltr is still working on, in one place — working on now with live progress, up next, playable-but-finishing, and needs attention. A small footer counter replaces the old full-width import banner.
Prepare all queues everything at once: bulk prepares land the whole batch in the queue immediately instead of trickling in one song at a time, while the server paces the work.
Music-video backgrounds arrive on their own: songs imported from your music folders or Apple Music look up their official music video automatically, behind a strict match gate so deep cuts stay clean.
Better artist portraits: artist images now come from a curated artwork source first, at full resolution, with a New photo button to re-roll any portrait you don’t like. Your own uploads always win.
Plus lyric timing editing folded into the song inspector, lyrics lookups that survive provider outages, safer song-file replacement, and a Settings layout that reads comfortably on wide windows. Includes everything from v1.51.1.
v1.51.1
A closer look at every song
A premium song inspector: click any song and it opens into a redesigned tabbed view. Details lays out title, artist, album and more as clean labeled fields with a star rating and explicit toggle, and adds composer, language, key, comment and BPM. Lyrics shows a karaoke stage with a click-to-seek synced list that fills word by word. Video hosts an inline music-video player, or a “Set the stage” empty state that walks you through adding one.
One door to add music: the three separate toolbar buttons are now a single Add music entry that opens a panel and scans on the spot. Connect a folder inline and the library refreshes live, drop files onto an always-on target, or take one of the alternate routes it offers. The Settings music-folders list is now a clean read-only inventory.
Plus fixes for first-run setup and the “Find your music” step, folder rows opening the detail panel, native remotes sending raw mic audio, and displaced TVs being evicted instead of leaving a silent dead room. Includes everything from v1.51.0.
v1.51.0
Bring in the music you already own
Import your iTunes or Music.app library: point Beltr at an exported library file and your whole collection shows up, browsable like any connected folder. Playlists come across immediately, and each track prepares itself the first time you pick it.
Karaoke discs and karaoke videos, recognized on sight: Beltr now spots CD+G pairs, MP3+G zips, and karaoke MP4/MKV files in your folders. Discs run through the MP3+G pipeline as usual; karaoke videos play on their own fullscreen TV player built for pre-rendered lyrics.
Paste a song list: drop in a list of songs from anywhere and Beltr matches it against your library. Anything it can’t find goes on a Wanted list that resolves itself as those songs turn up in later imports.
“Find your music” in first-run setup: the wizard looks for music libraries on your machine and offers to connect what it finds with one tap. The same scan lives in Settings for later.
Album artwork you control: browse artwork candidates from multiple sources, pick the one you want, and apply it across a whole album at once. The automatic art is kept as a backup so you can revert any time.
Edit any song’s details: title, artist, album, genre, year and more are all editable, and automatic enrichment will never overwrite something you set by hand.
Plus a dashboard that fills wide displays, inline and interruptible Prepare actions, an opacity slider for music-video backgrounds, big additions to the Apple TV, Google TV and phone remote apps, and fixes for live scores stuck at zero and junk video backgrounds. Includes everything from v1.50.0.
v1.50.0
The biggest Beltr update yet
One library for everything: songs from your connected music folders now appear right in the main library next to your prepared tracks. Pick any of them and Beltr prepares it on the spot — no more importing first and singing later. A waiting queue shows what’s coming up.
Sing sooner: a song becomes playable the moment its vocal separation finishes, while the rest of the prep continues in the background — and back-to-back songs start faster because the separation engine stays warm between jobs.
Difficulty settings for scoring: choose Casual, Standard, or Strict per session, with scoring that now compares against the song’s true fractional pitch so vibrato and blue notes are judged fairly.
Mic calibration: the TV measures your microphone’s round-trip delay with a short chirp test and remembers it per device, so scoring lines up with what you actually sang — even on Bluetooth mics.
A higher-quality separation model: machines with a supported GPU can opt into a new high-fidelity model in Settings for noticeably cleaner instrumentals on dense mixes.
Stage controls in one place: every stage control — mixer, themes, backgrounds, mics — now lives in a single tabbed panel on the TV.
One artist, one entry: tracks with featured guests no longer split your library into duplicate artist rows, and lyrics lookups for those tracks succeed far more often.
Plus smoother live pitch tracking, better lyric timing on intros and outros, a smaller installer, and fixes for the remote’s queue remove button and blank screens on Windows machines with a corrupted file-type registry. Includes everything from v1.45.3.
v1.45.3
GPU acceleration that turns itself on
Acceleration recovers on its own: if Beltr checked for your graphics card before its driver was ready — common right after installing a new GPU or updating drivers — it could stay on the slower processor path for good, with no obvious way back. Beltr now re-checks for a supported GPU each time it starts, so acceleration switches on by itself once your card is ready.
“Re-detect” actually re-checks: the Re-detect button in Settings now re-scans for your GPU on the spot and offers to apply the change, instead of only suggesting a restart. Includes everything from v1.45.2.
v1.45.2
The Linux app launches again
Linux builds work again: a toolchain bug in the Linux build container corrupted a few bundled math libraries, so the v1.45.1 .deb and AppImage installed fine but the app never started. Those libraries are now repaired and verified during every build, so a broken Linux bundle can’t ship again. Includes everything from v1.45.1.
v1.45.1
New builds show up without a hard refresh
Updates appear on a normal reload: Beltr was letting browsers hold onto old app files after an update, so the TV, remote, and dashboard could keep showing a stale version until a manual hard refresh. Beltr now revalidates its frontend on every load, so a new build shows up the moment you reload. Includes everything from v1.45.0.
v1.45.0
Lyrics that light up as you sing them
Lyrics reveal word-by-word on the TV: instead of upcoming lines sitting in flat black, unsung lyrics glow in a soft, theme-matched ink and fill in as each word lands — with a subtle scrim band behind the active line so it stays crisp over any video background.
Your library plays in album order: songs imported from an album keep their real track order from import through the queue, so a queued album flows the way it was meant to.
“Add All” skips whatever’s already playing: bulk-adding a list to the queue no longer re-adds the song that’s on right now.
Your vocal level sticks between songs: the vocal mix you dial in stays put when the next song starts instead of snapping back to the default. Includes everything from v1.44.1.
v1.44.1
Sharper source icons
The “Bring your music into Beltr” cards look right: the three ways to add music — Apple Music, choose a folder, and folder or network path — now share one consistent icon style and color instead of a mismatched amber/gold/red set, with a proper Apple logo and clearer folder and network-drive marks. Includes everything from v1.44.0.
v1.44.0
Bring your own music
Adding your own music is a guided first step: the Music Library screen opens with a clear “Bring your music into Beltr” — connect Apple Music, choose a folder, or point Beltr at a network/NAS path, each explained in a line. Once a source is added, songs fill a full-width list with one-tap filters by source, and a single “Add source” button manages your libraries later.
“Split here” works in the timing editor on Mac: splitting a lyric line while fine-tuning timing was silently failing in the desktop app (it used a browser pop-up the Mac app blocks). It now opens a proper in-app field.
The GPU acceleration chip no longer sticks on the dashboard.
v1.43.2
Lyrics behind the firewall
Lyrics work on managed and corporate networks: on networks that inspect secure traffic (Zscaler, Netskope, and the like — common in schools and offices), Beltr could split a song but come up empty on lyrics. Beltr now trusts your computer's own certificate store, so lyrics, artwork, and metadata fetch normally instead of silently failing. It includes everything from v1.43.1.
v1.43.1
Back on Mac
The macOS build is back: the previous update shipped without a Mac installer, which left Mac users on their earlier version. This release restores the Apple Silicon build and gets automatic updates flowing again. It includes everything from v1.43.0.
Steadier Linux builds: fixed a permissions issue that could stop the Linux installer from building.
v1.43.0
Set up once, keep it
Your GPU pack and models stay put: the GPU acceleration pack and downloaded speech models now live in their own per-machine spot, separate from your library folder. Change or move where Beltr keeps your songs and you keep the multi-gigabyte downloads — no re-fetching from scratch. Existing installs migrate automatically on first launch.
GPU acceleration installs on Linux: fixed the Linux acceleration pack, which unpacked its bundled Python runtime the wrong way and left GPU speedups unavailable.
A clear heads-up when disk space is tight: Beltr checks free space before downloading a Whisper speech model, so a full drive gives you a plain message instead of a stalled, half-written download.
v1.42.0
Lyrics, front and center
Clean lyrics by default: the TV opens straight to plain, readable lyrics, without the live score, line ratings, or team scoreboards. Turn full party mode back on any time from the Stage panel.
One switch for backgrounds: a new "Show backgrounds" toggle turns off album art and music videos across every song at once and drops to a clean dark stage.
Readable over anything: every lyric line now carries a subtle dark outline, so the words stay legible over bright or light artwork.
Removing a background sticks: delete a song's video background and it stays gone, instead of quietly re-downloading the next time you play it.
Fixed splitting lyric lines: the "Split here" button in the timing editor works again.
v1.41.0
The setup is the show
A brand-new first run: setup is now a fullscreen cinematic show — license, folders, GPU acceleration, and host PIN, each set up inside the story of what Beltr can do, ending with your room open. Existing installs see it once after updating, with every answer prefilled.
Onboarding double-take fixed: finishing setup now reliably hands off to the dashboard without a second tour.
Background GPU install stays visible: opting into acceleration shows live download progress while you finish the remaining steps.
Host PIN, your way: regenerate the party PIN or type your own six digits during setup.
v1.40.7
Self-healing activation
Self-healing activation: if your computer’s identity changes (a rename, a hardware swap), Beltr now detects the stale device registration and quietly re-registers on its own — trials and licenses keep working without a reinstall.
Steadier trial syncing: song-count syncing paces itself and retries once on a brief server hiccup, so momentary lag no longer produces spurious errors.
v1.40.6
Crisper lyrics, smoother pitch bar
Crisper lyrics on the TV: the soft glow halo around lyrics is gone. Words render clean and sharp over any background, and sung words are marked by color.
Smoother pitch bar: the note highway now draws at full frame rate, so notes glide across the screen instead of juddering.
Activation on strict networks: license and trial checks now work behind proxies that inspect secure traffic (common on work and school networks).
Trial fix: the built-in sample songs no longer count toward your trial.
v1.40.5
Sharper lyric timing, steadier GPU acceleration
More accurate word-by-word timing: a new alignment engine lines the lyrics up to the vocal more precisely, so the highlight tracks what’s actually being sung.
Graphics-card acceleration turns on more reliably: if your acceleration pack was out of date, Beltr refreshes it automatically on launch, so the pitch bar and analysis run on the GPU when your hardware supports it.
Smoother pitch bar: pitch detection reuses a single warmed-up process per song instead of restarting each pass, which cuts stutter and speeds up song prep.
v1.40.4
Acceleration pack installs again
Fixed installing the graphics-card acceleration pack: on the last couple of versions the pack’s download list failed to publish, so installing or repairing acceleration could error out. This restores it — already-installed setups are unaffected.
v1.40.3
Fullscreen escape, and a tidier setup screen
Press Esc to leave fullscreen: on Windows and Linux there was no way out of the fullscreen TV screen once it opened. Esc now drops back to a normal window, and F11 toggles fullscreen on and off.
The setup screen never covers a playing song: the “Setting the stage” screen could occasionally stay up after you skipped a song mid-prep. It now clears the moment playback starts and never sits over the song that’s playing.
v1.40.2
The whole pipeline, on your GPU
Full graphics-card acceleration for song analysis: the last two steps that still ran on the processor now use your graphics card too — pitch detection (which powers scoring and the pitch bar) and word-by-word lyric alignment. On machines with acceleration installed, a song finishes processing faster from start to finish.
Clearer progress while a song is analyzed: after separation, the “Analyzing” stage now shows real sub-progress instead of sitting on a single number, with better logging behind the scenes if anything needs attention.
v1.40.1
Steadier acceleration, lyrics, and games
Acceleration recovers from a bad setup on its own: if a machine ended up with a graphics-card pack it can’t actually use, Beltr now clears it on launch instead of getting stuck on “needs repair,” and falls back to the fast CPU path.
More reliable GPU pack installs: installing the acceleration pack now resumes interrupted downloads, retries cleanly after a network hiccup, and the wizard tracks real progress and surfaces failures instead of getting stuck on “pending.”
Whisper transcription uses your GPU too: when acceleration is available, automatic lyric transcription runs through the same accelerated path.
Live GPU status on the dashboard: the acceleration panel shows your actual graphics device and remembers the result of the last install.
“Name That Beltr” steal mechanic: buzz in with the wrong answer and the round opens up for other players to steal the point.
Fixes: lyrics that briefly fetched too short now re-resolve fresh instead of serving a stale version; seeking backward resyncs scoring; a finished game round can no longer come back to life after the reveal; rapid skip and seek bursts stay in sync between phone and TV; album art no longer goes missing when MusicBrainz rate-limits a burst; and a flaky or intercepted connection is no longer misreported as “offline.”
v1.40.0
Graphics-card acceleration, done right
Smarter GPU acceleration on Windows: Beltr no longer offers a graphics-card pack on cards that can’t run the separation model (many AMD and Intel GPUs). Those machines use the fast CPU path instead, and the setup screen says so plainly rather than offering a download that wouldn’t help.
Separation always finishes: if an accelerated separation ever fails partway, Beltr automatically retries on the CPU instead of getting stuck — so a song always completes.
A clearer acceleration panel: the dashboard’s GPU settings are redesigned, with a plain-language explainer of what acceleration does and whether your machine can use it.
A fresh first run: the setup wizard has a refreshed Beltr look and a cleaner walkthrough.
Linux separation fixed: resolved a packaging issue that could break vocal separation on Linux.
v1.33.0
Party games that keep the night moving
Party games stay on the rails: a game now pauses the karaoke queue while it runs and remembers what it already used, so songs and lyrics stop repeating mid-game. Name That Beltr can’t get stuck on a slow buzzer, and Finish The Lyric and Lyric Mad Libs show the right answer and winners on both the phone and the TV.
Reveal Reel reaches the whole room: a finished clip is sent to every phone in the room — not just the singer’s — with a “Grab your clip” button right in the iPhone and Android remotes.
The TV lyrics look right again: the active word lights up in yellow with the smooth gradient sweep, long lines wrap instead of clipping, and lyrics stay put when a phone or the TV briefly drops and reconnects mid-song.
The pitch bar fills the quiet stretches: songs with long un-sung sections no longer leave the note highway empty — the guide notes carry through the gaps.
Companion apps keep maturing: the iPhone remote gets a premium “Cinematic Stage” pass with iOS 26 Liquid Glass, and BeltrTV is now one universal app for both Apple TV and iPad. (Separate downloads — your desktop Beltr is still the host.)
v1.32.3
A tidier library and fully native remotes
Your library fills in its own blanks: missing album, genre, and year are filled automatically from iTunes and MusicBrainz, and albums group by the album artist instead of splitting apart over featured-guest credits.
Real album art, not video stills: Beltr now prefers true cover art over a frame grabbed from a music video, and shows it in the song list, the queue, and now-playing on both phone remotes.
Remotes find the room on their own: the iPhone and Android remotes auto-discover the server on your network — no QR scan, just enter your name and join.
Mix & Effects, rebuilt native: both phone remotes drop the old embedded web sheet for fully native mixer and effects controls, plus a “Cinematic Stage” visual polish across the Android app.
v1.32.1
Lyrics that stay centered
Long lyric lines stay centered on the TV: a line too long for one row now wraps and stays centered, instead of sliding to the left and clipping off the right edge.
Native remotes keep getting better: ongoing polish across the iPhone and Android remote apps and the Apple TV & Android TV stages — including an offline demo on Android TV so you can show it off without a server running.
v1.32.0
Beltr on the big screen
Beltr on Apple TV: a native tvOS app turns the biggest screen in the house into the karaoke stage — synced lyrics, the SingStar-style pitch bar, live scoring, a now-playing card, and music-video backgrounds. It plays your separated songs and classic MP3+G / CD+G discs. Phones join by scanning the on-screen code, exactly like the web TV. It’s in public beta now — join on TestFlight.
Beltr on Android TV & Google TV: the same native stage for Android TV — lyrics, the pitch highway, scoring from a phone mic, album art, and CD+G graphics — sized to render crisply on a real 1080p panel.
Remote lyrics that feel like the TV: the phone remote now matches the Apple TV’s lyric fluidity — words fill one at a time as they’re sung, long lines fit instead of running off the edge, and the line glides on a smooth clock instead of jumping.
Vocal slider syncs to the TV: slide the guide-vocal level on your phone and the TV’s mix updates live, so anyone in the room can dial the original vocals up or down on the fly.
v1.31.0
Record and share the night
Reveal Reel captures your performance: Beltr films your take as you sing and creates a vertical clip on your machine, ready to share the moment it ends.
Scan the QR, it's on your phone: after the song, a code appears on the TV. Scan it and the clip lands on your phone, where you can post it, text the group, or save it — made on your machine, shared only when you tap.
Opt in once, then it just works: approve recording the first time and Beltr films every performance by default. Turn it off anytime from the stage panel, or capture just the last 20 or 60 seconds instead of the whole song.
v1.30.8
Sing through your phone, on the big speakers
Phone mic, room speakers, no squeal: use your phone as the microphone and hear your voice through the TV or room speakers in real time. Beltr guards against feedback automatically, so you can hold the phone near the speakers without the howl.
Voice on TV or Score only: while you sing through your phone, choose whether your voice plays out loud or you just get scored quietly — practice without waking the house.
Headphone-aware: plug headphones into your phone and Beltr eases off the room speakers on its own.
Beltr Remote (free): the companion app is live on the App Store and Google Play. Scan the QR on your TV and your phone becomes the wireless mic and remote.
v1.30.7
A clearer view with the note guide on
Live score stays out of the way: with the pitch bar turned on, your running score drops just below the note highway so it never covers the lanes.
v1.30.0
Practice Mode, sharper lyrics, instant first run
Practice Mode: rehearse any song solo. Slow it down without changing pitch, shift the key to fit your range, loop a tricky A–B section, and spot the lines you keep missing.
Sharper synced lyrics: the TV keeps the upcoming line readable from across the room, and your phone now matches the TV’s typeface with a smoother word-by-word highlight that tracks the music more tightly.
Ready the moment you open it: a fresh install lands on a live, ready-to-sing demo, with no setup wizard.
Truer classic discs: MP3+G / CD+G playback is more faithful, with smoother scrolling and correct transparency and colors.
Connects on the first try: the room QR points at your real Wi-Fi address even with virtualization or a VPN installed.
v1.20.6
Quicker to ready, smoother on slow networks
Songs get ready sooner: more speed-ups to processing, and tracks that already have good synced lyrics now skip extra alignment work.
No more brief freeze on a slow network: the app stays responsive while background checks run, so the TV and your phones don’t stall when your connection is slow.
v1.20.5
Faster song processing
Songs get ready faster: vocal separation and pitch analysis both got a big speed-up, so the wait from adding a song to “ready to sing” is noticeably shorter, especially when you queue several at once.
Windows: no more firewall pop-up: the Microsoft Store version no longer trips Windows’ “Allow access?” prompt on launch, so your phones can reach the TV without anyone having to click through a warning first.
v1.20.4
Songs that bring their own lyrics
Embedded lyrics import: if a track has lyrics saved in its file tags and nothing turns up online, Beltr now imports those automatically, so tagged downloads and AI-made songs arrive with words instead of a blank screen.
Live preview when you export: the export screen now renders your karaoke disc with the exact theme and font you picked, so you can see how it’ll look before you export.
Pitch bar from the dashboard: flip the scrolling note highway on and off straight from the dashboard, alongside the phone remote.
Cleaner TV stage: a now-playing header up top, plus tighter pitch-bar and lyrics spacing, make the TV view easier to read across the room.
Disc Glow-Up toggle fixed: the remote control for restyling classic MP3+G discs was getting dropped before it reached the TV; turning it on now actually applies.
v1.20.3
Pitch bar, one-button export & disc glow-up
Pitch bar: a scrolling note highway rides along on the TV, showing the notes ahead and how close your voice is to each one in real time. Turn it on from the phone remote.
One Export button: exporting is now a single button and a single screen. Send a karaoke disc to a download, to a folder, or batch-export your whole selection to a USB drive, with your choice of format, layout and audio mode.
Export to USB: write a batch of karaoke files straight to a thumb drive, with presets and naming layouts that work on commercial karaoke machines.
Classic Disc Glow-Up: restyle older MP3+G discs on the fly to match your active TV theme, with an intensity dial. Controlled from the remote.
Smarter guide vocals: MP3+G files that carry a guide vocal on one channel are detected automatically, so the vocal-mix slider just works on them.
v1.20.2
Redesigned MP3+G export
A real export screen: pick a karaoke theme, choose a font, set the audio mode (instrumental or with a guide vocal), and name the file, with a live preview of how the on-screen lyrics will look before you export. Your last choices are remembered for next time.
Cleaner graphics on hardware: screen clears now send the full Memory Preset burst that real CD+G players expect, so the title card no longer bleeds through the first lyric line on hardware machines.
v1.20.1
MP3+G on every screen
Karaoke graphics on your phone: MP3+G songs show the original karaoke video right on the phone remote's now-playing screen, synced to the TV. No more "no lyrics" placeholder for tracks where the lyrics live in the graphics.
Preview MP3+G in the song details panel: open any imported MP3+G song from the dashboard and you can play, pause, and scrub through its karaoke graphics inline before queueing it.
Play Now jumps to Now Playing: picking Play Now from a song's menu sends the phone to the Now Playing tab automatically.
Brighter library: songs without uploaded artwork pull cleaner covers and artist images in the background, so the tile grid looks finished without any manual work.
Smoother sync on the phone: fixed a clock-sync issue that caused the phone's karaoke video to drift behind the TV for MP3+G tracks. Also hidden the vocal-mix controls when an MP3+G song is playing, since those only apply to stems-separated audio.
v1.20.0
MP3+G karaoke discs come to Beltr
Drag in your MP3+G karaoke discs: drop a CD+G zip (or a paired .mp3 + .cdg) and Beltr imports the whole disc, recognises the title and artist from the filename, and adds each track to your library.
Native CDG playback on the TV: MP3+G tracks now play through a built-in karaoke renderer, no transcoding step, no waiting around. The graphics start the moment you press play.
Export any song as MP3+G: turn a song from your library into a standard MP3+G pair that plays on a hardware karaoke machine. Pick an audio mode, save the files, drop them on a USB stick.
Format badges: MP3+G and HD tracks now show a small badge in song rows so you can see at a glance which is which.
Less Windows nagging: the firewall prompt that used to appear on every MSIX update is gone, and the NSIS installer registers its firewall rule on first install instead of asking each time.
v1.19.1
Export your lyrics + a tidier library
Save lyrics as a .lrc file: once a song's lyrics are synced, an Export .lrc button downloads them as a standard file. Keep a backup, load them into other karaoke players, or move them to another computer. They re-import cleanly into Beltr, so you never sync the same song twice.
A cleaner library: removed the status dot that showed on every track, gave songs without lyrics a clearer "Add lyrics" prompt, and refreshed the favorite heart.
Ready to sing sooner: a song becomes playable the moment its music is separated, instead of waiting on lyrics to finish in the background.
Lyrics no longer get lost: fixed a timing issue that could drop freshly made lyrics or leave a song stuck while processing.
v1.19.0
Scrub to any moment
Drag to seek: grab the progress bar and jump anywhere in a song. Works on the phone remote and the dashboard, with a live time preview that follows along, and every screen stays in sync.
Keyboard control on the TV: ← and → skip back and forward 10 seconds, and Space pauses or resumes.
Vocals start in Guide mode: new songs begin with a soft vocal guide instead of full lead vocals, and the on-screen label always matches what you're hearing.
v1.18.0
Setting the stage
A nicer "getting ready" screen: while a new song is being prepared, the TV now shows a polished "Setting the stage" screen instead of a plain progress bar.
Cleaner artwork: artwork you upload is automatically squared off so it sits neatly everywhere it appears.
Dashboard fix: corrected the library grid when the sidebar is collapsed.
v1.17.0
Your whole library, reimagined
A brand-new music library: browse everything you've imported by Artist, Album or Genre, each with its own page, plus a Recently Added view that keeps your latest songs up top. It feels like a proper music app now.
Details filled in for you: genre and year are detected automatically across your library, including songs you imported long before this update.
Scoring on your terms: a new Scoring toggle in host controls turns on-screen scores and line ratings on or off.
Better lyrics tools: a Sync Now button re-fetches and re-aligns lyrics on demand, and a built-in timing editor lets you nudge any line into place by hand.
More accurate synced lyrics: smarter matching and cleaner timing mean more songs line up correctly the first time.
v1.16.0
A beautiful new dashboard
A redesigned host dashboard: the Now Playing area is now a glowing centerpiece that picks up the colours of the album art and gently comes alive while a song plays. Glass surfaces, smoother controls, a calmer, more premium feel throughout.
Respects your system settings: with "Reduce Motion" on the animations stay still, and the glow pauses when the dashboard isn't the active window.
The first song appears right away: no more being stuck on "Nothing playing" at the start of a session.
Play/Pause works on the first tap: no more needing several clicks on the first song.
v1.15.7
Smoother, clearer importing
See what's importing: a banner shows live import progress, and closing Beltr mid-import offers to resume the unfinished songs in one click.
No more frozen "Done": the progress bar now shows the real stage until the song is genuinely ready to play.
The walkthrough closes properly: the "Got it" button in the "How Beltr works" guide now closes as expected.
Accurate import count: the banner count no longer lags behind what's actually finished.
v1.15.5–6
A guided first run
"How Beltr works" walkthrough: a clear first-run guide: the four ways to put Beltr on your TV, how friends scan the QR to turn phones into remotes, and how to search and queue songs.
TV link and QR code, right there: get a phone connected without hunting through menus.
Stays out of your way: if you already have a library, Beltr skips the walkthrough instead of covering your songs.
v1.15.4
Microphone setup, front and center
A real mic setup screen: connect your mic with one tap, pick the input, set the level and choose a vocal effect (Natural, Studio, Concert or Cathedral). Or Skip to sing without scoring.
Works however you start a song: the mic permission prompt now reliably appears.
Lyrics show on your phone again: fixed the remote getting stuck on "Loading lyrics…".
v1.15.1–3
A new look for the remote
Redesigned phone remote: every screen sits on a living ambient backdrop that picks up the colors of whatever's playing, with soft frosted-glass cards throughout.
The remote follows your TV theme: pick Neon, Retro, Concert or Vaporwave on the TV and the phones recolor to match.
Never miss your cue: during long intros the TV shows a countdown meter that fills to the moment the next line starts.
The right video, every time: background videos are matched to the song's artist and title; no confident match means no video instead of the wrong one.
v1.15.0
Support bundle + dashboard polish
One-click Support Bundle: collects your logs and system info into a single zip you can email to support@beltr.app.
Cleaner dashboard header: server status sits inline next to the logo; Settings is a clearly labeled button.
Unified rounded cards and a friendlier empty library with a clear drop zone.
v1.14
Redesigned dashboard + faster playback
New dashboard layout: collapsible sidebar, hover-reveal actions, and a compact command bar.
Sort your library by title, artist, date added, or duration.
Search & paste lyrics from multiple sources, or paste an LRC directly.
Instant playback: eliminated the ~10-second delay before audio.
Auto-fetch artwork and game sound effects for party games.
v1.13.5
Party games + delay compensation + lyrics editor
Three mini-games for the breaks between songs:
Name That Beltr: a clip plays and everyone races to buzz in with the song. Higher difficulties strip the vocals.
Finish the Lyric: pick the right next line from four choices before time runs out.
Lyric Mad Libs: fill in blanked-out words; the TV reveals everyone's answers next to the real lyrics.
Audio delay compensation: a delay slider nudges lyrics to line up with Bluetooth speakers; syncs across devices.
Built-in lyrics editor: retime, edit, split or merge lines and save a portable .lrc.
v1.13.0–4
New default look + smarter lyrics
Fresh default theme with deep ember tones and a pink-to-gold lyric glow.
TV and phone wrap lyrics the same way: long lines split at natural pauses so both screens match.
Songs process 25–40 seconds faster when matching lyrics are already available, and TV lyrics scroll without stuttering.
v1.12.0
Dashboard queue control
Play, queue, and reorder songs right from the dashboard. No phone needed.
Drag-and-drop queue reordering syncs instantly to every device.
Runs quietly in your menu bar and can launch at login.
v1.9.6–1.11
Apple Silicon, FLAC & stability
Native Apple Silicon support: faster processing, no Rosetta.
Lossless FLAC stems use half the disk space.
Better error messages, smoother first launch, a license that survives updates, and more reliable TV-to-phone connections.
On the roadmap
Your license includes every future update. Next up is duet mode: lyrics split across two screens, with each singer’s own lines highlighted. Native remote apps for iPhone and Android are out now, and party history and stats have shipped.
