A net under every language: what's new in v1.13

v1.13 is about reach without setup: bringing the English pipeline’s polish to every other language Castwright performs, and taking the friction out of listening on your other devices.

A net under every language. A non-English book used to be hard-locked to one engine with no recovery path — if a character’s voice wasn’t designed yet, or was briefly unavailable, the chapter stopped. Now it falls back to a generic voice and keeps going, exactly as English books always have. Coqui XTTS joins as a casting choice in its own right for Russian, Spanish, French and German, and the cast view names the real fallback engine rather than leaving you to guess.

Listening from the sofa works the moment you install. Reaching Castwright from a phone or tablet used to mean a special command and hand-made certificates. Every production install now starts up ready — secure, device-locked, and able to pair — and if certificates can’t be set up it degrades safely to your own machine and tells you the one command that fixes it. Devices you’ve already paired stay paired across an upgrade.

A name from the foreword no longer joins your cast. A critical essay or introduction that quotes a different real author used to have that person cast as a one-line speaker, who then stuck around in the roster. Castwright now recognises a front-matter chapter for what it is and leaves its names out of your cast; those lines go to the narrator, and genuine walk-on characters are untouched.

“Design full cast” rides out a busy GPU. If something else was using the card mid-run, every remaining character used to fail one after another while the progress bar climbed toward 100% — once reading “0/16 · 94%”. Castwright now recognises that particular contention, waits out a brief pause, and if it really can’t proceed it stops with a message naming the cause and how far it got. The percentage no longer counts failures as progress.

Hear a voice before you commit to it. Every base voice in the override picker gained a play button, so you can audition one against your character’s own line without assigning it first.

And the controls finally fit a thumb: touch targets across the library and top bar are full-sized on tablets, not just phones, and a view toggle that looked live but did nothing at tablet width is fixed.

Getting all of this onto your machine is a single click if you use Pinokio — that landed just before this release, and it now runs the whole way through.

Many voices, one machine.

Download the beta, or update from inside the app.