AudioPad 1.1: UI Redesign, Transport Dock & Audio Engine Polish

AudioPad 1.1 is our biggest update yet! This release delivers a fresh modern UI theme, a newly overhauled playback transport dock, custom sound card cover art, a guided virtual audio cable onboarding wizard, and major audio engine stability enhancements.

Highlights

• Redesigned Desktop Theme: A cleaner, refined dark interface with updated window dimensions and modernized header badges.
• Interactive Playback Transport Dock: Real-time scrubber with pointer capture, pause/resume seeking, and instant playback status.
• Sound Card Customization: Right-click context menus, custom image backgrounds for sound cards, and batch file assignment.
• VB-Cable Guided Onboarding: Step-by-step setup screen that automatically detects virtual cable drivers and verifies audio routing.
• Volume & Slider Synchronization: Fully unified master, headphone, and microphone volume controls that stay in sync across the header and settings view.
• Lossless Audio Playback: Resampled audio decoding to eliminate premature MP3 cutoffs and preserve sound tails.

Added

• Sound Image Backgrounds: You can now personalize individual sound cards with custom image covers. Images are persisted and serialized directly to your local library.
• Batch Assignment Modal: Quickly import and assign directories of sound effects at once with automated naming.
• Right-Click Context Menu: Added a native right-click (RMB) context menu on sound tiles for faster access to renaming, hotkey binding, image customization, and deletion.
• VB-Cable Setup Screen: A dedicated virtual audio cable onboarding wizard that checks for driver installation, tests microphone loopback, and provides direct setup instructions.
• Single Instance Detection: AudioPad now alerts you if another instance is already running rather than silently failing or clashing over audio ports.
• Global Volume Controls: Added master volume controls with linked and unlinked modes for headphone monitoring and microphone output.

Improved

• Smooth Transport Dock & Seeking: The bottom transport bar now tracks playback state immediately, features smooth ~100ms progress updates, and supports pointer-captured scrubber dragging.
• Audio Resampling: Decoders are now automatically resampled to match native hardware sample rates, preventing premature cutoff on high-sample-rate USB devices.
• Scroll Preservation: Playing sounds no longer resets or jumps the scroll position of your soundboard library.
• Lighter Installer Footprint: Purged legacy external download dependencies and runtime redistributables, resulting in faster download times and leaner resource usage.

Fixed

• Individual Stop Buttons: Fixed an issue where individual stop buttons on active sound cards failed to interrupt playback streams.
• Volume Slider Desync: Resolved an issue where header volume sliders disappeared or went out of sync with values on the Settings page.
• Startup Blank Screen: Resolved startup race conditions where WebView controller bounds were uninitialized, preventing white-screen startup crashes.
• System Tray Stability: Guarded tray update operations to prevent notification failures from disrupting webview promises.
• Seek Buffer Stutters: Applied pending seeks before decoding PCM frames so seeking paused audio resumes cleanly without stuttering old buffer frames.

Removed

• Legacy YouTube Downloader: Removed the built-in downloader helper (youtube-dl/ffmpeg) and its background dependencies to keep AudioPad lightweight, compliant, and focused on core soundboard performance.

Under the Hood

• CMake & Compiler Modernization: Updated CMake policies to modern standards (3.16...3.30) and eliminated MSVC build warnings across audio, hotkey, and UI modules.
• Open-Source Governance: Added formal CONTRIBUTING.md, SECURITY.md, and CODEOWNERS guidelines to the repository.