Release Notes

A-B Roll 1.8.6 — Build 10010

Focus: Smoother media control, faster NDI workflows, cleaner sidebar controls, and safer license refresh behavior.

A-B Roll 1.8.6 is a wider-beta readiness update focused on improving the day-to-day operator feel of A-B Roll ahead of wider beta testing. The video scrubber now behaves much more like a proper playback head, the NDI Picker opens faster after the first discovery pass, and sidebar controls are easier to click and understand.

This update is recommended for all beta testers.

What’s new

Improved video scrubber

The media scrubber has been significantly improved for more reliable cueing and playback control.

• Scrubbing while paused now moves the visible video frame to the selected position.
• Scrubbing during playback now jumps cleanly to the selected position.
• Click-to-jump behavior is more accurate.
• Fast scrubbing no longer causes the playhead to “catch up” through old queued seek positions.
• Final seek position is more precise after dragging or clicking the scrubber.

This makes A-B Roll feel much more like a real media playback tool for cueing clips before sending them to air.

Faster NDI Picker reopening

The NDI Source Picker now opens much faster after the first discovery pass.

• First NDI discovery may still take a few seconds.
• Subsequent picker opens now show cached sources immediately.
• Background refresh continues after the picker opens.
• A “Refreshing…” state indicates that discovery is updating.
• A-B Roll’s own NDI outputs remain hidden from the picker to avoid accidental feedback loops.

Cleaner sidebar controls

The sidebar has been polished for clearer media and NDI source adding.

• Added a blue plus button for adding media files.
• Added a green plus button for adding NDI sources.
• Improved empty sidebar layout.
• Reduced excess spacing in the populated sidebar.
• Removed unwanted focus-outline behavior around sidebar buttons.
• Improved button hit boxes so controls are easier to click.

Better button hit areas

Several controls now have more forgiving click targets.

• Play/pause controls are easier to click.
• Monitor/headphone buttons have larger hit areas.
• Sidebar add buttons respond more naturally across their visible area.

Safer license refresh during beta testing

A-B Roll now better protects valid Pro activations during local/debug testing and backend staging scenarios.

• Production license tokens now use the new kid=v2 signing path.
• The app continues to trust both kid=v1 and kid=v2 during the transition period.
• Valid production tokens are protected from being wiped by stale staging-backend responses.
• Existing Pro users should remain activated after updating.

Deferred

Sidebar drag-to-reorder has been intentionally deferred from this release.

Playlist/rundown workflow is still an important future area, but it needs proper design and wider beta feedback before implementation. For now, the focus is on shipping a stable wider-beta build and collecting real operator feedback.

Update notes

Existing beta users can update through A-B Roll → Check for Updates… or download the latest build from the beta download page.

A-B Roll 1.8.5 — Build 10009

Focus: License-token signing key transition and activation continuity ahead of wider beta.

A-B Roll 1.8.5 is a small security and activation bridge release ahead of wider beta. This update adds support for the new production license-token signing key while preserving compatibility with existing beta activations.

Existing Pro users should remain activated after updating.

Includes

• Dual-trust license-token support for kid=v1 and kid=v2.
• Production license backend now signs refreshed and new tokens with kid=v2.
• Existing beta activations continue to work during the transition.
• Sparkle update signing is unchanged.
• All v1.8.4 stability fixes remain included.

Expected behavior

• No NDI behavior changes are expected in this release.
• No playback behavior changes are expected in this release.
• No Sparkle behavior changes are expected in this release.
• No UI behavior changes are expected in this release.

A-B Roll 1.8.4 — Build 10008

Focus: Cleaner NDI discovery, automatic source reconnects, reliable monitor toggles, and safer single-window operation.

A-B Roll 1.8.4 is a focused beta stability and operator-polish update. This release improves first-launch presentation, NDI source handling, monitor-state reliability, and overall app safety during live operation.

What’s new

• Cleaner first-launch window sizing: A-B Roll now opens at a larger default size on fresh install, making the full dual-player interface visible immediately — including Player Well B and both NDI Output panels.
• Sidebar Player Well indicators: Playlist rows now show compact visual badges when a source is loaded into Player A, Player B, or both. This makes it easier to see what is currently assigned without scanning the main player wells.
• Cleaner app menus: Unused placeholder View and Media menu items have been removed. This also eliminates dead shortcuts and avoids conflicts with system shortcuts such as Spotlight.

NDI improvements

• Improved NDI Picker deduplication: The NDI Picker now collapses duplicate entries for the same source when NDI advertises multiple endpoints, such as LAN and 127.0.0.1 loopback addresses. This should reduce confusing duplicate OBS and NDI HX entries.
• Automatic NDI reconnect after source restart: If a connected NDI source disappears and later returns — for example, OBS quits and reopens — A-B Roll now attempts to reconnect automatically instead of remaining stuck in a disconnected state.
• Better NDI discovery logging: NDI discovery now logs clearer DEDUP and REFRESH events, making future diagnostics easier when sources appear on multiple IPs or stale network records are reported.

Monitor toggle fixes

• Monitor state now persists per Player Well: The local monitor/headphone toggle now behaves consistently across source swaps. If Monitor is off in Player A or B, switching from media to NDI — or NDI back to media — should preserve that setting.
• Fixed monitor icon/audio desync: The headphone icon and actual monitor audio state now use the same underlying per-well state, preventing cases where the icon showed one thing while the audio did another.

App safety

• Single-window operation enforced: A-B Roll now prevents duplicate app windows and tabs. This avoids accidentally creating multiple sets of Player Wells, NDI receivers, senders, timers, and discovery processes.

Fixes and polish

• Fixed fresh-install window geometry.
• Improved visual clarity in the sidebar.
• Removed unwired menu commands.
• Reduced duplicate NDI source clutter.
• Improved reconnect behavior for live NDI sources.
• Improved monitor-toggle consistency across Player A and Player B.
• Preserved existing Sparkle update behavior.

Known notes

• This release does not yet include Ed25519 license-key rotation. That remains planned before a wider beta rollout.
• Persistent playlist/session restore, drag-to-reorder, rename sources, and deeper player lifecycle cleanup remain future polish items.

A-B Roll 1.8.3 — Build 10007

Focus: Smoother NDI output, faster playlist building, and clearer Free-tier feedback.

A-B Roll 1.8.3 Build 10007 is a stability and workflow update focused on smoother NDI output, faster playlist building, and clearer Free-tier feedback.

What’s new

• Improved NDI Output audio lifecycle stability.
• Fixed an issue where NDI output audio could become inconsistent after source swaps or output toggles.
• Added File menu shortcuts:
  • Add Media Files: Cmd+O
  • Add NDI Source: Cmd+Shift+N
• Added Edit menu support for Delete Selected.
• Added Cmd+Backspace to delete the selected playlist item.
• Added multi-file drag-and-drop into the playlist sidebar.
• Added multi-select support to the Add Media Files picker.
• Added non-blocking Free-tier limit messages when the playlist cap is reached.
• Improved Free-tier playlist counter wording from “files” to “items,” since media files and NDI sources both count toward the playlist limit.

Fixes and improvements

• Playlist additions no longer silently fail when the Free version limit is reached.
• Add Media Files now shows the Free limit message immediately when the playlist is already full.
• Multi-file drag/drop respects Free and Professional tier behaviour.
• Unsupported files and duplicate files are skipped cleanly.
• Adding files no longer interrupts active playback.
• Sidebar workflow is faster and more keyboard-friendly.

Known issues

• Monitor On/Off state may reset when swapping between Media and NDI sources. This is tracked for a future local monitoring-path polish pass.
• NDI Picker load time may still feel slower than ideal. Discovery timing will be revisited in a future update.

Build 10005

Focus: NDI receive audio stability.

This build targeted the rare crash some testers saw while cutting between an NDI source, a video, and still images with NDI Output enabled. The crash showed up inside macOS's audio converter when two players were receiving NDI audio at once.

What changed

• The NDI audio monitor was serialised — only one audio frame is converted at a time, so two receivers cannot collide.
• Incoming audio samples are safely copied before being handed to the audio engine, so a brief lifetime mismatch cannot dangle a pointer.
• Stricter sanity-checks on incoming NDI audio frames, including sample rate, channel count, frame size, buffer pointers, and planar strides. Malformed frames are dropped instead of crashing.
• Each receiver now has a uniquely-labelled background queue, so any future crash report tells us exactly which player was involved.
• Internal cleanup of duplicate NDI bridge files so future investigations are not misled by stale code.

Build 10004

Focus: NDI discovery and source-picker stability.

If you had been seeing your own A-B Roll outputs disappear from other apps, or sources flickering in and out of the picker, this is the build that addressed it.

• Same-machine NDI loopback is enabled by default. A-B Roll can receive its own outputs and those of other apps on the same Mac without extra setup.
• Multi-pass NDI discovery scans the network in several passes at startup so slow-to-announce sources still show up.
• The source picker has a stable cache with a short grace period, so a source that briefly drops a beacon does not disappear from the list.
• Own-output filtering is rename-safe. Renaming Player A or B no longer causes A-B Roll to see itself in its own picker.
• Local Network and Bonjour entries were hardened in Info.plist so macOS prompts cleanly for NDI permissions.
• Sparkle in-app updates from 10003 to 10004 were confirmed working. Thanks Oscar.

Build 10003 — Hotfix Re-package

Focus: Launch-blocking install issue on tester Macs.

Shortly after 10003 went out, testers reported the app failing to launch with a Library not loaded: @rpath/libndi.dylib error. That meant the NDI runtime was not being copied inside the app bundle. It was only working on machines that already had the NDI SDK installed in a developer location.

Fixed in the re-package

• libndi.dylib is now properly embedded inside A-B Roll.app/Contents/Frameworks/ and code-signed at copy time.
• Stale developer-only library search paths were removed from the release build.
• A new preflight check in the release pipeline refuses to ship an archive that is missing the embedded NDI runtime, so this regression cannot slip through again.

If you are still on the original 10003 package and seeing a launch crash, install the hotfix re-package or move to the latest recommended build.

Build 10003

Focus: First closed-beta build.

The first build delivered to the closed-beta cohort. Headline features at this point:

• Wells architecture with two players, NDI input, NDI output, and audio monitoring.
• Live activation against the Stripe-backed license.mixup.live backend. Pro tier removes the watermark.
• Sparkle-based in-app updates over updates.mixup.live.
• Developer-ID signed and Apple-notarised release pipeline.