Release notes
What's new in Vocateca?
Every release, in plain language — no fluff, no marketing spin.
Download Vocateca 2.2.4
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15 patch releases hidden
Vocateca 2.2.4
Released August 14, 2026- Back-catalog fills now run to the end. Steadily transcribing a show's older episodes no longer stalls after the first batch — it keeps going until the whole show is done.
- Adding a YouTube playlist (or several videos at once) opens the Library once, when the whole batch has finished transcribing — not once after every single episode.
- Fixed episodes that had finished transcribing still showing as “Pending” in the Library. The status is correct now and updates live, whichever tab you're on.
- Deleting a transcript now asks first, everywhere — the row menu, the toolbar button and the new drag-to-delete all show a clear confirmation of exactly what will happen. Selecting several and deleting now removes the whole selection, not just one.
- New: drag onto “Recently deleted” to remove things — one or more episodes (just their transcripts), or a whole show or person (unsubscribed, with transcripts kept in Recently deleted for 30 days). Each case confirms what it does first.
- Shows “By person” now matches “By show”: open a show's full Details / Edit again (double-click, right-click, or the Details button), the stats bar stays when you switch modes, and the toolbar sits in its own row above the list.
Vocateca 2.2.0
Released July 17, 2026- Adding anything is now one place: the new “Add” tab. It searches podcasts and YouTube — no API key, no account — takes any link, and takes files from your Mac. The old Add popup, the “Local Ingest” tab and the YouTube Explorer have all moved into it.
- You can search YouTube for a channel by name and see the subscriber count next to each hit, which is the only thing that tells four near-identically named channels apart. Pick one and the preview shows its latest uploads before you subscribe.
- Instagram can't be searched, and the tab now says so from the first character you type instead of letting you conclude it from an empty result list. Instagram accounts are still added with their link.
- A Spotify link that leads nowhere now explains why — no open feed, and the audio is copy-protected — instead of offering a “Try again” that cannot help.
- The transcript now scrolls along with the video and highlights the line being spoken. It stops following the moment you scroll yourself, and picks up again when you stop.
- Shows and Creators are one tab with a switch: view your subscriptions by show, or by the person behind them.
- Vocateca now warns you before the disk fills up — a quiet bar first, a dialog when it gets serious — and offers to clear out media it no longer needs. If what it can free isn't enough, it says so and points at macOS's own storage tools rather than handing you a button that wouldn't fix it.
- The first-run setup no longer makes you wait for the transcription model. The tools still have to be there, but the model finishes downloading in the background while you get on with it.
- A new setup step gathers the two standing decisions — start at login, and fetch new episodes automatically — instead of burying them.
- The tutorial now covers Background and Power mode, and Settings explains what the switch actually changes.
- Settings no longer drops you into the middle of a category when you switch to it.
- The “Keyword Watchlist” tab is now simply “Watchlist” — in the sidebar and its own title — and its ⌘-number, which had quietly stopped working, is back.
- Both views of the Shows tab now have a search field — filter your subscriptions by show or by the person behind them — and the Settings search is now as wide as the Library’s.
- The sidebar is tidier and narrower: it sizes itself to exactly fit the longest tab name and its unread count — growing only if that count needs another digit — with Settings and Help stacked at the bottom and the old stats line gone.
- The action buttons in the Add tab’s video preview moved up into the window toolbar, matching every other tab — and the Status and Queue toolbars no longer spill their controls into a broken overflow menu.
- Speaker recognition and Instagram are now marked Experimental, so you know where the rough edges still are.
Vocateca 2.1.0
Released July 16, 2026- The YouTube Explorer is now a full feature (no longer beta): paste a link to watch the video beside a timestamped, scroll-synced transcript — pick the caption language, copy in any format, save to your Library, or subscribe.
- Cleaner YouTube auto-captions: rolling, duplicated caption lines are collapsed into clean sentences automatically.
- New Chrome extension: send a YouTube video to Vocateca with one click from your browser (Settings → YouTube).
- Invite friends by sharing your referral link from the macOS share menu.
- ffmpeg is found reliably — a Homebrew install works even when the app is launched from Finder, and Vocateca can install its own copy (incl. ffprobe) with no setup.
- Your library loads and scans without stalling on large collections; finished transcripts resolve much faster.
- Storage safety: the media cap never exceeds half of your Mac's free disk, and the Status tab now shows your free space.
- A tidier Status tab, a searchable “Check for updates” in ⌘K, and clearer guidance when the disk is nearly full (open Storage settings / empty the Trash).
Vocateca 2.0.0
Released July 10, 2026- Complete native Mac rewrite — faster, lighter, and built from the ground up for macOS.
- On-device transcription, so your audio never leaves your Mac — a fast default engine, with Whisper as fallback.
- Automatic speaker detection shows who said what in every transcript.
- Subscribe to podcasts and YouTube channels, or bulk-import your existing subscriptions with OPML.
- Watch folders transcribe local audio and video files automatically as soon as they land.
- Export transcripts as Markdown, SRT, plain text, HTML, or the open OKF format.
- Automatic proper-noun correction keeps names and terms consistent across transcripts.
- Automate your workflow with the command-line tool, an MCP server for AI assistants, webhooks, and Notion/Obsidian sync.
- Invite friends — share your link, your friend gets a free month of Pro, and you earn a free month per year for every friend who stays Pro.
- Free forever for manual transcription, with Pro adding automatic background transcription — now available in English and German, with a privacy dashboard and automatic updates.
Paragraphos 1.6.0
Released June 27, 2026- A full "Vapor" visual redesign brought a macOS Liquid Glass look in light and dark, following Apple's Human Interface Guidelines.
- The UI moved from PyQt6 to PySide6, clearing the way for an open-core release of the code.
- Paragraphos Pro made its debut: a Pro account, gated Schedule and folder-watch automation, and an upgrade flow — with active clicks staying free.
- Transcription got smarter: per-episode language auto-detection, auto-vocabulary prompts drawn from past transcripts, and optional low-confidence word marking.
- Reliability improved with automatic retries for transient failures, pre-transcribe integrity checks, a disk guard, and time-boxed undo for destructive actions.
- New ingestion features: YouTube playlists, back-catalogue date backfill, re-upload detection, OPML import, and bulk export to Markdown, JSON, HTML, or PDF.
- A new per-show episode browser, an expanded command-line interface, webhooks, and a local automation API brought full parity between the app and the CLI.
Paragraphos 1.5.0
Released June 25, 2026- A single background-load level (quiet / balanced / full) replaced the separate parallelism knobs for transcription.
- Adding a show from the command line now requires a --backlog choice, so an automated add can no longer silently transcribe an entire back-catalogue.
- The running app no longer overwrites external edits to watchlist.yaml — it detects the change and merges it instead.
- A show discovered outside the normal add flow is now flagged for review, with a banner to choose how much history to fetch.
- A new AGENTS.md file documents how AI assistants can operate Paragraphos unattended.
Paragraphos 1.4.0
Released May 18, 2026- A missed daily feed check — because the Mac was asleep or the app was busy — now runs automatically the next time the app comes to the foreground.
- Paragraphos now also checks for app updates when brought to the foreground, not just at startup, capped at once every 24 hours.
- A new Settings toggle turns update checking off entirely.
- The "update available" notification now fires once per release instead of repeatedly.
- Podcast search and cover-art fetching now share the app's pooled connection, fixing inconsistent timeouts.
- Fixed a bug where the queue could reclaim episodes added mid-run, pushing the progress counter past the total.
Paragraphos 1.3.0
Released April 23, 2026- Universal ingest: any audio or video file can now be dropped on the app, pasted as a URL, watched via a folder, or bulk-imported from a directory.
- Full command-line parity with the app (23 commands), including JSON output for scripting and AI assistants.
- Feed failures are now categorized (DNS, timeout, forbidden, and more) with a specific recommendation and a one-click retry.
- The parallel-transcribe setting now actually runs multiple transcriptions at once, instead of always running one.
- Fixed whisper silently producing no transcript for some podcast episodes because the app couldn't find Homebrew's ffmpeg when launched from Applications.
- Fixed a class of feed failures on networks that synthesize IPv6 addresses, which had been wrongly rejected as private.
- A startup log line now records the version, macOS, hardware, and every tunable setting, to make problems easier to diagnose.
- Queue and Shows tab toolbars were reorganized to the top, with clearer sorting and a persistent Library page listing every transcript on disk.
Paragraphos 1.2.0
Released April 22, 2026- YouTube channels became first-class shows: subscribe to a channel and new videos transcribe automatically.
- A captions-first transcript path fetches uploader-provided captions instantly, falling back to whisper only when none exist.
- Each channel can override its transcript source: captions, always whisper, or auto-captions as a fallback.
- yt-dlp installs itself on first YouTube use and keeps itself updated weekly.
- A new Settings filter can hide YouTube entirely, including skipping the yt-dlp install.
Paragraphos 1.1.0
Released April 21, 2026- Downloads now run in parallel across multiple worker threads, with a per-host cap.
- Interrupted downloads resume instead of restarting from scratch.
- Right-click an episode to run it next or run it now, jumping the queue.
- A keyboard shortcut cheatsheet (press ? or Cmd+/) lists every shortcut.
- Settings now shows the whisper model's health — file size, hash, and whether it's drifted from the pinned version — with a one-click re-transcribe-all when it has.
Paragraphos 1.0.0
Released April 21, 2026- The first release of Paragraphos, the Python/Qt app Vocateca grew out of.
- A redesigned sidebar navigation replaced the old tabs, with live counts for Shows, Queue, and Failed.
- A new Queue dashboard shows overall progress with a human-friendly finish estimate like "before lunch" or "tomorrow morning".
- The Failed tab now explains errors in plain language, with actions to retry, mark resolved, or skip an episode forever.
- RSS feeds refresh concurrently and skip unchanged feeds, and downloading plus transcribing now run as a two-stage pipeline.
- Re-transcribing a single episode is now one click, keeping the old transcript around for comparison.
- Bulk actions in the Shows tab let you disable, enable, mark stale, or delete multiple shows at once.
- A three-mode Add Podcast dialog supports adding by name, by URL, or by pasting an Apple Podcasts link.
Paragraphos 0.1.0
Released April 20, 2026- The very first build — a menu-bar app with a watchlist and a daily monitor that picked up new episodes on its own.
- Library dedup by GUID and filename, and a filename sanitizer that kept umlauts intact.
- An MP3 retention policy, a backlog filter, an RSS health check, OPML import, and a spot-check notification.
- Verified against 16 real-estate podcast feeds on the first run: 2,023 reference episodes, nothing missed.