HYPERCRATE 1.2.11 is out
Settings has been reorganised and redrawn, scrolling is now yours to tune, plus four fixes, two of them for Macs that have moved to macOS 27.
New
- Settings, reorganised. Twelve categories in three groups, so each setting sits where you would look for it. A new Browser category holds scrolling, filters and what each row shows, a new Shortcuts category gathers every shortcut you can change together with the reference, and Help & about brings the manual, support and the diagnostic log together. The panel now wears the Layer Deck’s look: recessed groups, raised icon tiles and a colour per category. Search still finds everything.
- Scroll speed. Settings > Browser sets how many rows the sample list moves per mouse wheel notch, from one to ten, with an optional glide between notches. SUMMON and the folder tree follow the same setting.
- Trackpad and Magic Mouse. A separate speed for finger scrolling, and a momentum switch: leave it on for the usual coast after the fingers lift, or turn it off so the list stops exactly where your fingers do.
Fixed
- Pressing Escape on a control reached with the Tab key did nothing. It now hands focus back to the sample list.
- On macOS 27, clicking the HYPERCRATE icon in the menu bar quit the app instead of opening its menu. The menu bar icon is now HYPERCRATE’s own, so Open and Quit work again on macOS 27 and behave exactly as before on earlier versions.
- On macOS 27, HYPERCRATE could quit on launch while it caught up on similarity indexing. The Find Similar graphics model has been rebuilt so it runs on macOS 27, and if a speed check ever takes the app down again, the next launch skips it instead of repeating the crash.
- Similarity indexing could drop from the graphics card back to the processor part way through a large import and stay there for the rest of it, even though the graphics card was still several times faster. The safety check now confirms its suspicion against a short burst of processor work before switching, and switches back if the graphics card was the quicker of the two.
Updating
Installed copies update themselves on the next launch. If you are on macOS 27 and the app has been quitting on launch, it cannot reach the updater: download the 1.2.11 installer from the store and run it over your existing install. Your library, tags and settings are kept.
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Feels kinda stupid to ask that but anyway… How much vibe is in the code? Do you maintain any other software products?
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Not a stupid question at all! HYPERCRATE’s development is heavily AI-assisted, but I think there’s a pretty big distinction between “vibe coding” and software engineering with AI.
I use proper SDLC workflows around it, with version control, CI/CD, testing, code review and agentic loops that test, inspect and fix their own work. So it’s not a case of throwing prompts at Claude Code and shipping whatever comes out.
HYPERCRATE is the only software product I currently maintain. My main background is in music production, but I’ve been pretty technical since I was young. I was building PHP sites in my teens and have always had a strong interest in hardware, software and system architecture. I’m not going to pretend I’m a traditional career software engineer, but I’m also not coming at this with zero technical understanding and blindly accepting whatever an AI spits out.
AI has basically filled the gap between having the technical understanding and product ideas, and being able to actually build something of this scale myself.
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Version 1.3.2 Latest 21 September 2026
Pause background work, richer MIDI preview sounds, several folders at once, and sixteen fixes from the first days of Sidecar, with thanks to everyone who wrote in.
- The DAW chip is in Sidecar. The follow-the-DAW switch now sits at the end of Sidecar’s tempo well, the same chip as the transport bar’s, so you can turn the link on and see it is on without leaving the column. Until now Sidecar had no way to switch it on, so the plug-ins could show LINKED while the app kept its own tempo.
- Sidecar’s header is one row shorter. Loop preview, Auto-play and the Layer Deck switch now sit at the right end of the tempo and root key row, and the column’s minimum width grows just enough to keep them there, so the browser gets that line back.
- A shortcut for Settings. Press Ctrl+, (Cmd+, on a Mac) to open Settings, and again to close it. The convention every Mac app follows, and now HYPERCRATE does too.
- Steps light up as they hit. In the Layer Deck’s step view, each lit step now flashes the lane as the bar lands on it, with the same glow a playing one-shot wears. The harder you set the step, the brighter and wider the flash, so a ghost note glimmers and a full hit lights the lane. Switching between the waveform and the steps now flips over like the Audio and MIDI switch.
- Pause background work. A pause button now sits at the left of the analysis speed pill in the status bar. It stops everything HYPERCRATE does in the background: analysis, similarity indexing, and the library checks that read your drives, which no speed level ever slowed down. Made for the moment a DAW session needs the disks to itself. Folders you add while paused still appear at once and their analysis waits. The pause survives a restart, the status bar says it is on, and one press on play carries on from where it stopped. The same switch is in Settings under Library, for the times the pill is not showing.
- Steps are per lane. The steps mark beside a one-shot lane now switches that lane alone, so one lane can run a pattern while the next keeps its plain repeat. Undo puts back just that lane, and kits remember each lane’s view. Kits you saved with Steps on still load with every one-shot lane on steps.
- Long one-shots stay clear on Steps. When a long sound is retriggered on a Steps lane with DECAY lit, the earlier hits still ringing are now turned down under each new hit and carry on quietly beneath it, so an 808 or a pad on sixteen steps stays clear. Hits that have already faded, like kicks and hats, sound exactly as they did. There is nothing to set, and what you mix down or drag out matches what you hear.
- Richer MIDI preview sounds. The piano, electric piano, bass, strings, synth, pad and drum kit that play your MIDI files are rebuilt in full stereo, with a wider string section, a fuller kit, new synth and pad sounds and notes that ring out naturally. Every voice now previews at the same level as your audio samples, whatever velocities the file holds, and in the app they sit in a subtle room. Previews sent to your DAW through Sync stay dry.
- Select several folders at once. Ctrl+click (Cmd+click on a Mac) folders in the sidebar to see them together in one list, across packs too. Search, tags and every other filter work on the combined view, and it comes back with the tab and after a restart. With several packs selected, drag one and they all move together.
- Swap the sound, keep the pattern. Every Layer Deck lane now has a swap button beside Mute and Solo. Click it and the lane holds its place while you flip through other samples in the browser: each one plays in that slot with the lane’s volume, low cut, pump and rate, and on a Steps lane it plays the pattern you drew, in time from the first hit. Steps you draw while trying a sound stay with the slot. Keep swaps the new sound in, Esc puts the old one back. It is the lane menu’s Replace, now in plain sight, and the rate no longer changes from one kick to the next while you browse.
- Sort by Type. Click the Type column header to group one shots, loops, tracks and MIDI together, and click again to reverse it.
- Column titles in Sidecar. Sidecar now shows the Name, Preview and Audio/MIDI titles above its list, with the same width handles as the full window: drag the seam beside Name or Audio/MIDI, and double-click the Audio/MIDI seam to reset it. Sidecar remembers its own widths, so setting them never changes the full window’s columns, and click Name to sort.
- Fixed: HYPERCRATE’s memory use grew every time you switched in or out of Sidecar and never came back down, so a long session with a lot of switching could climb to several gigabytes. The animation between the two layouts kept its pictures of the window after it had finished, and held on to about half a gigabyte of graphics memory from the first switch onward. Both are now released the moment the animation ends.
- Fixed: In Sidecar, dragging the column wider could make the folder drawer slide into view by itself, then slide away again. The drawer now only moves when you open or close it.
- Fixed: In Sidecar, the tag category pills sat tight against each other. They have more room around each name now, and they only draw closer together when that is what keeps them all on one row.
- Fixed: On a Mac, the interface could freeze for a moment, and for seconds on a large library, when you played or dragged a sample while HYPERCRATE was still tagging or indexing in the background. The two were waiting on the same database lock, and on macOS that wait landed on the interface. Play and drag history is now written off to the side, so it never waits on the interface.
- Fixed: A loop you reversed in the browser joined the Layer Deck the right way round, and R over its row did nothing while the deck was open. A reversed loop now joins the stack reversed with a REV chip on its lane, and R flips that lane in place while the rest of the stack keeps playing. A reversed one-shot still joins forward, so drag that one out reversed instead.
- Fixed: After you corrected a sample’s BPM or key by hand, its audio-to-MIDI conversion kept the old grid, so the MIDI you dragged into your DAW came out at the detected tempo rather than the one you set. A key or BPM edit now clears that conversion and the next MIDI toggle rebuilds it at your values, and a tempo you typed is never second-guessed by the loop-length check.
- Fixed: On Linux with an NVIDIA graphics card, on an X11 desktop such as Cinnamon, HYPERCRATE could start with no window at all: its panel entry and tray icon appeared and nothing else did. The window was there and drawing, and the graphics driver never put it on screen. HYPERCRATE now draws through the route that driver handles, so the window appears as it should.
- Fixed: On Linux, grabbing the edge of the Sidecar column to resize it could start dragging the sample under the pointer instead. The resize strip is wider in Sidecar, and a press that close to the edge never starts a drag.
- Fixed: On Linux, MP3 files encoded at 22 kHz or lower, the 8 to 96 kbps kind found in spoken word and older vocal packs, could refuse to open or open at twice their real length, so their duration, key and BPM were wrong. HYPERCRATE now reads MP3 on Linux with its own decoder. Right-click their folder and choose Re-scan key & BPM once after updating.
- Fixed: With auditions routed to your DAW through Sync, clicking a grid cell of the loop previewing in the Layer Deck started the cell on top of the preview instead of replacing it, and removing the preview left the cell playing. The preview is retired first now.
- Fixed: With the MIDI type chip on, the folder counts in the sidebar left out the MIDI files that sit beside loops of the same name, and a pack’s MIDI-only folder could be missing from the tree while its files showed in the parent’s list. The sidebar now follows the chip the way the list does. Those files stay hidden with the chip off, and Hide companion MIDI files in Settings still turns the rule off for good.
- Fixed: On Windows, dragging a grid slice out of a loop could drop nothing. The drag only began once the slice had finished rendering, so letting go quickly, or holding the drag and switching to your DAW or a folder with Alt+Tab, cancelled it before it started. A slice now leaves the moment you pull it, with its waveform under the cursor like any other drag, and pulling straight up or down starts the drag as well as pulling sideways.
- Fixed: A pack’s MIDI folder could be missing from the sidebar, with its files left out of the pack’s count, when the folder was named something like “MIDI Loops” and any other pack in the same library had a folder called “Loops”. HYPERCRATE took the MIDI for copies of that other pack’s audio and hid it. A MIDI folder is now only treated as a companion of audio in its own pack. Very large libraries, above 100,000 folders, were skipped by this check altogether and no longer are. Libraries correct themselves on the first launch after updating.
- Fixed: The slice size box and the measure stepper beside it showed only their right arrow when you hovered them. The left half still worked, it just had no arrow drawn on it. Both arrows show now, and the volume icon missing from one page of the setup guide is back too. In the browser, the measure stepper also sat on top of the last slices of the row’s waveform while a slice was playing, so those slices could not be clicked or dragged. The waveform now stops short of it.
- Fixed: Some libraries were missing the tags their file and folder names spell out, so a loop called “drum loop” could sit outside the Drums filter and a “lofi” pack outside Lo-Fi. It happened when a very large first import was still running as the app closed, and to any pack copied into a folder HYPERCRATE already watched, because names were only read when an import finished. Names are now read for every sample, however it arrived. Your library fills in by itself in the background on the first launch after updating, and tags you removed yourself stay removed. Manage folder tags also showed those never applied tags as unticked, where pressing Apply would have removed them for good. It now only opens a tag unticked when you were the one who took it off.
- Fixed: In Manage folder tags, pressing Apply without changing anything could copy a tag you had added by hand to a single sample onto every sample in that folder, and put it back on samples you had removed it from. A tag you added by hand now goes onto the whole folder only when you add it there or tick it yourself.
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