What's new in Beltr.

v1.60.7August 29, 2026

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.

v1.60.6August 29, 2026

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.

v1.60.5August 27, 2026

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.

v1.60.4August 26, 2026

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.

v1.60.3August 25, 2026

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.

v1.60.2August 23, 2026

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.

v1.60.1August 23, 2026

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.

v1.60.0August 22, 2026

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).

v1.59.3August 19, 2026

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.

v1.59.2August 18, 2026

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.

v1.59.1August 17, 2026

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.

v1.59.0August 15, 2026

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.

v1.58.0August 12, 2026

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.

v1.57.9August 10, 2026

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.

v1.57.8August 8, 2026

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.

v1.57.7August 6, 2026

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.

v1.57.6August 5, 2026

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.

v1.57.5August 4, 2026

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.

v1.57.0August 2, 2026

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.

v1.56.0July 31, 2026

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.

v1.55.9July 30, 2026

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.

v1.55.8July 28, 2026

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.

v1.55.7July 27, 2026

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.

v1.55.6July 27, 2026

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.

v1.55.5July 26, 2026

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.

v1.55.4July 26, 2026

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.

v1.55.3July 25, 2026

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.

v1.55.2July 25, 2026

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.

v1.55.1July 25, 2026

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.

v1.55.0July 24, 2026

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.

v1.51.1July 21, 2026

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.

v1.51.0July 18, 2026

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.

v1.50.0July 16, 2026

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.

v1.45.3July 14, 2026

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.

v1.45.2July 14, 2026

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.

v1.45.1July 12, 2026

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.

v1.45.0July 10, 2026

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.

v1.44.1July 7, 2026

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.

v1.44.0July 6, 2026

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.

v1.43.2July 6, 2026

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.

v1.43.1July 5, 2026

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.

v1.43.0July 5, 2026

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.

v1.42.0July 4, 2026

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.

v1.41.0July 2, 2026

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.

v1.40.7July 2, 2026

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.

v1.40.6July 1, 2026

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.

v1.40.5June 30, 2026

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.

v1.40.4June 29, 2026

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.

v1.40.3June 29, 2026

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.

v1.40.2June 29, 2026

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.

v1.40.1June 29, 2026

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.”

v1.40.0June 28, 2026

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.

v1.33.0June 25, 2026

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 Tune 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.)

v1.32.3June 22, 2026

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.

v1.32.1June 21, 2026

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.

v1.32.0June 19, 2026

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.

v1.31.0June 13, 2026

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.

v1.30.8June 9, 2026

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.

v1.30.7June 7, 2026

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.

v1.30.0June 2, 2026

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.

v1.20.6June 1, 2026

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.

v1.20.5May 31, 2026

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.

v1.20.4May 30, 2026

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.

v1.20.3May 29, 2026

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.

v1.20.2May 29, 2026

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.

v1.20.1May 27, 2026

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.

v1.20.0May 27, 2026

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.

v1.19.1May 25, 2026

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.

v1.19.0May 23, 2026

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.

v1.18.0May 23, 2026

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.

v1.17.0May 21, 2026

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.

v1.16.0May 18, 2026

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.

v1.15.7May 18, 2026

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.

v1.15.5–6May 17, 2026

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.

v1.15.4May 17, 2026

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…".

v1.15.1–3May 16, 2026

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.

v1.15.0May 16, 2026

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.

v1.14May 11, 2026

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.

v1.13.5May 5, 2026

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.

v1.13.0–4April–May 2026

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.

v1.12.0April 25, 2026

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.

v1.9.6–1.11April 2026

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.