Hey guys,
Just dropping a line on what this update is all about. Focused on performance enhancements, this update also brings additional Deno dependency support, new audio player shaders 🎉 , along with additional UI cleanup and bug fixes.
Be on the lookout, this update will be heading your way soon!
Performance
The last update (7.1.3) was focused around upgrading the Electron framework. Since then, I've received feedback that performance has degraded, specifically on MacOS 26.
MacOS 26 introduces new UI frameworks and API's to work with Liquid Glass and applications that implement older versions of Electron see "Major GPU performance" issues. These issues has been frustrating enough to warrant a dedicated site that's keeping track of main stream Electron apps and shaming those who haven't upgraded their framework yet!
So, if Stacher was upgraded to Electron version 38.3.0 in the last update, then why are there still performance issues?
Good question - Stacher was utilizing some unnecessary Electron API's, specifically for UI rendering enhancements, that still appear to be problematic with Mac OS 26.
Stacher version 7.1.4 will remove those API implementations with the intentions of improving performance on MacOS.
In addition to those changes, 7.1.4 will also update how Subscriptions within Stacher are managed. An issue was found where users with many subscriptions would launch Stacher and immediately enter a laggy state while those subscriptions were being processed.
On a technical level, this was due to Stacher noticing that you had a ton of subscriptions that were "due" and queued them all at the same time which essentially caused a bottleneck in the queuing mechanisms via the context bridge of Electron.
While Stacher is multi-threaded, this bottleneck was causing lag and by implementing some short delays and awareness of how many items are getting queued at once, this issue should be resolved.
Expanding on Subscriptions performance, the Subscriptions view was updated to "lazy-load" subscriptions to reduce lag time. This should make the UI more "snappy" when navigating into this view.
If you are still experiencing any performance issues related to the above after upgrading to 7.1.4, you can use Stacher's feedback mechanism directly in the app to let me know what issues you are having as you experience them.
Deno
Stacher 7.1 and higher has already been pre-configured to work with Deno but, if you would like to use different Javascript runtime environments, you can now configure those directly from the Advanced tab of the settings window!
Audio Player Shaders
Shaders are essentially code that run within the GPU and are used primarily for rendering graphics. In this case, audio visualizations!
Two new shaders have been added. You can use the "sparkle" icon in the far right of the audio player controls to change the audio visualization at any time.
Bugfixes and UI Cleanup
In addition to the above, 7.1.4 also:
Fixes an issue with long audio files crashing
Adds horizontal scrolling to the library table view
Fixes a bug with re-saving notes that have been added to media files
Fixes an issue where arguments were not correctly being passed during the metadata fetch stage
Added a "Skip to page" control in the Library pagination element
Fixed an issue where the status would "freeze" in the tray icon UX
Updated the developer chat input box to resize for long text so you're not typing on a single line
Fixed an issue with the developer chat that was preventing some users from attaching logs
Added a paste button for the license key input box
Fixed an issue where Stacher would become a blank screen if it was minimized for a long period of time
Updated the custom video player to fullscreen instead of falling back to the default player. This will allow heat maps, chapters, and thumbnail previews to be displayed while in fullscreen mode
A full change log and history is always available at https://changelog.stacher.io