The beta keeps moving: what's new in v1.9.0

We opened the doors a few days ago and said the first books through the forge would shape what came next. They have. v1.9.0 is the first release since the beta went live — a polish-and-reach release. The same finished product, now reaching more screens, holding your place across your devices, and reading truer than it did last week.

Listen from any screen in the house. Authorize a browser on your home network and your whole library opens there too — the laptop in the kitchen, the tablet by the bed. No upload, no account; the audio still never leaves the house. Trust is something you grant to a device, and revoke just as plainly when you’re done with it.

Your devices now agree on where you are. Finish a book on your phone and it leaves the Continue-listening shelf on your desktop too — and the other way round. Start it again and it quietly comes back. The companion player got steadier in the same pass: it shows the chapter you’re on, marks the ones you’ve finished, and pauses for a phone call the way any player should.

See the bad take before you hear it. When a chapter finishes, any line that ran long, left too long a gap, or — with transcription turned on — didn’t say the right words lights up as an amber band on the waveform. One control walks you through each one and seeks a moment early, so you hear it in context. The plainly broken takes already never reached your ears; now the borderline ones are a glance away.

A cast that reads truer — Russian included. A name on the title page can no longer wander into the cast as a phantom character. Russian books now get their roles, descriptions, and narrator written in their own language, and two spellings of the same character fold into one voice instead of splitting the part. A freshly designed voice now auditions as itself.

Underneath all of that, a quieter kind of work: a full security pass — a torch CVE closed, a thorough CodeQL sweep, another round of dependency hygiene — so the foundation you render on is one you can trust with a long book, and a longer series.

We’ll keep shipping like this. The beta isn’t a frozen snapshot waiting for launch; it’s the product, out in the open, getting better week by week. Voice cloning — your own voice, with consent, kept at home — is in development, and it’s next.

Download the beta, or update from inside the app — it now tells you the moment a new build lands.

Many voices, one machine.