Fulwave Designer release notes

Version 1.5.2

October 2026 · Direct build only

• The Direct build now checks fulwave.com for a newer version a few seconds after launch, at most once a day, and offers a download link. Check by hand with Fulwave Designer ▸ Check for Updates…, or turn the automatic check off in Settings. Only the app name and version number are sent.
• No other changes. Your projects open as before. The App Store build is unchanged and updates through the App Store.

Version 1.5.1

October 2026

• A refreshed app icon: the Fulwave logo is brighter and larger.
• No other changes. Everything in 1.5 is unchanged, and your projects open as before.

Version 1.5

October 2026

Plugins and MIDI (Direct build)

• Add any Audio Unit effect to a layer's chain or to the Stage Mix, next to the built-in filters. Open its window to adjust it; its settings are saved with the project.
• Instrument layers: a layer whose sound is played by an Audio Unit instrument or generator. Choose the notes, how hard they're struck, and how long the release lasts.
• Audition renders eight seconds of an instrument so you can judge a patch. Hold runs it live until you stop it, so you can open its window and turn its controls while it sounds.
• Audition and Hold play the layer through its own filters and chain plugins, and adjusting a filter or plugin is heard as you do it.
• Plugins in a chain run live while the transport plays, in the same order the export uses. A live/dry switch beside Render Mixes turns that off if a heavy chain makes playback stutter.
• Wire a MIDI controller's knob to any gain or pan control.
• Closing a project now closes its plugin windows.
• The window says "Direct Build" at the bottom of the export panel and in About, so you can tell it from the App Store version.

Shaping sound (both builds)

• Filters and EQ: low cut, high cut, band, low shelf and high shelf, with gentle, steep and brick-wall slopes and a live response curve. Available on every layer and on the Stage Mix.
• Delay with feedback, wet mix, and a stereo bounce. Moving its time gives the tape-delay sound.
• Movement: sine, triangle, square, random steps and random drift, aimed at gain, pan, a filter or a delay's time.
• Draw gain and pan curves across a stage: press on the curve to add a point, and drag to shape it.
• Tone and noise layers: sine, triangle, sawtooth, square, and white, pink and brown noise.
• Record a layer straight into a stage.
• Hear stage filters and delays live in the preview, in the same order the export applies them.

Voices and spoken text (both builds)

• The Voice menu is sorted by quality, with a link to download better voices, and the export pane warns when a stage bakes a macOS system voice.
• "Deliver as live speech" is honored on a stage that is nothing but its text.

Editing (both builds)

• Simple and Full modes (Settings ▸ Editing). Simple hides filters, delay, movement, drawn curves, and plugins and MIDI. Hidden settings still apply, and a layer using them says so.
• Session Overview (Window menu): the whole session in one compact list. Click a stage or layer to jump to it.
• Revert to Rendered Version puts an edited stage back as it was when you rendered it.

The manual has been rewritten to cover all of this.

Version 1.4

August 24, 2026

• Hear a session the way it will actually play. The transport now performs stage fades and crossfades instead of cutting between stages, so the part of a session you most want to judge is finally the part you can audition.
• Render a stage and the preview plays the exact file the export will carry: the offline mix, with the loud layers, the pan law and the normalization all in it, rather than the live graph's approximation of them. Editing the stage puts it back to live on its own; there is no mode to leave.
• Text fields let go of the keyboard. Return commits and steps out, Escape leaves things as they were, and the transport bar tells you when a field has the keyboard, so the space bar goes back to being play/pause. ⌥Space plays without leaving the field.
• File ▸ Open Recent, for the last ten projects and sessions you worked on.
• A window no longer opens with the session name selected, one keystroke from being replaced.

Version 1.3

August 23, 2026

• Spoken text can now travel as text. A text layer mixed with music used to be baked into the exported audio in a Mac voice, frozen there. Now it ships as words, and FulwaveTimer reads them in whatever voice the listener has, in any language they like, or shows them silently to read along. On by default, per layer.
• A baked phrase now always shows its words on screen, so the one thing a listener can still work with never disappears into the mix.
• The Export pane names the stages that are still baking a phrase: the single choice the person receiving the session can't undo.
• Session graphics export at four times the resolution. FulwaveTimer shows a session's graphic on the Lock Screen, where the artwork is drawn far larger than a list thumbnail, and small exports arrived there soft. Re-pick a session's graphic to bake it at the new size.

Version 1.2

August 2026

Setting a stage's length is typing again. The length was three stepper columns (hours, minutes, seconds), so a 12-minute stage meant twelve clicks on one arrow and there was no keyboard route at all. It's now a single field you type into: 5:30, 90, and 1h30m all work, and a bare number means seconds. Anything it can't read is refused rather than applied, so a typo can't quietly zero a stage.

• Preset lengths, 30s through 30m, one click each. A click sets the length; hold ⌥ Option and it adds instead, so you can build 5:30 from 5m and 30s. The chips relabel to +5m while Option is held.
• A layer's "Starts at" delay takes the same typed field: enter 1:30 instead of counting out 90 seconds.
• Layers are color-coded by what they are: teal for audio, orange for spoken text, gray for text that only shows on screen. Each one sits in its own numbered card, so an expanded layer's controls plainly belong to it.
• The transport timeline's lanes use those same colors, so a layer looks like itself wherever you meet it.
• A layer whose start delay lands past the end of its stage now says so. It was dropped from the export in silence before, which was easy to walk into by shortening a stage after setting the delay.

Version 1.1

August 2026

Spoken text now sounds in the preview the way it will in the export. Speech used to play straight out of the app, around the mixer, so gain, pan, and mute did nothing to it, and what you heard while building wasn't what you shipped. Every spoken line now runs through its stage's mix, follows the same controls as an audio layer, and matches the exported file.

• Repeat for the whole stage now works on spoken layers, not just audio files.
• A stage keeps one speaking layer. The format carries one text feed per stage, so a second one was silently dropped on export. Extra text layers are added as on-screen text instead, and projects that already have two are named so you can sort them out.
• The timeline tells the truth: a short spoken line draws as a short lane, and on-screen text blocks sit where their turn actually comes.
• On-screen text layers no longer offer start delay, gain, or pan. They make no sound, so those controls did nothing.

Version 1.0.1

August 2026

Your work is now protected when you close a window or quit. If a project has unsaved changes, Fulwave Designer asks before letting it go, and the window's close button shows the usual edited dot so you can see at a glance what still needs saving.

• Close (⌘W) works again. It was missing from the File menu.
• Open… is available when no project window is open, so you can reopen a recent project without creating a new session first.
• Various small fixes and cleanup.

Version 1.0

August 2026

First release.