What's New in v1.4.2

Released 2026-05-22, on the stable and beta channels together. This page also covers the 1.4.1 beta (2026-05-16), whose fixes 1.4.2 carries to everyone.

The biggest spec-compliance release Orbit has shipped. Files that declare multiple programmes — Full Mix / M+E / Stems / Accessibility variants — now route correctly when you switch between them; the sidebar surfaces the full BS.2076-3 audioProgramme / audioContent / audioObject tree; and a new in-line dub-track picker lets you swap dialogue languages without reopening the file. Plus a ton of finer sidebar features and a deeply re-architected audio engine pipeline under the hood.

How to read this page

Sections labelled (Pro) are part of Orbit Pro. Everything else is included in the free Orbit Standard edition. See the overview for a full Standard / Pro breakdown.

---

1.4.2

Multi-programme files now switch correctly (M+E, language variants, stems)

If your master declares more than one <audioProgramme> — Full Mix, M&E, an Accessibility variant, a stem mix — Orbit's programme picker now respects which channels belong to which programme. Switching to M+E mutes the dialogue tracks; switching back to Full Mix brings them in. The whole programme-membership filter is owned by the engine, so it's bit-identical to what an EBU ADM Renderer or any spec-compliant ADM player would do with the same file.

Previously, programme switching was a partial implementation — channels excluded by the active programme could still leak through. You may have run into this as "I muted everything in M+E and still hear dialogue." That's gone.

Dub-track / language picker

For files that ship multiple dialogue language tracks as complementary audioObjects (Mechanism B in BS.2076-3 §5.6.3), the sidebar now exposes a picker that lets you pick which language to route at playback time. Picker entries use the file's host-locale-matched audioObjectLabel where present — so "EN", "DE", "JA" appear with their localised display names in macOS's current language.

Multiple direct-speaker (bed) groups in one file

EBU workflows often package more than one bed group into a single master — a 5.1 music bed alongside a 7.1.4 effects bed, a backup mix sitting next to the primary one, or a dialogue stem broken out for accessibility delivery. Orbit used to flatten those into a single bed bank. 1.4.2 treats each declared bed group as a first-class entity:

• Every bed group gets its own sidebar row with the bed format ("Stereo", "5.1", "7.1.4", etc.), its audioObjectName, its declared gain, and its start time.
• Groups list in chronological start-time order — they appear in the sidebar the same way they sit on the timeline.
• Per-bed solo / mute (covered below) operates at the group level, so you can isolate "music bed", "effects bed", or "primary mix" without touching channels individually.
• Speaker labels resolve per group — Orbit honours BS.2094 common-definition labels (M+030, M-030, U+045, LFE, etc.) on each bed, so the bed-format detector reports the right shape even when groups overlap on trackIndex.

Single-bed files behave exactly as before — you only see the new structure when there's something to show.

BS.2076-3 sidebar — programmes, contents, dub-tracks, complementary groups

The ADM sidebar has been substantially rebuilt around the BS.2076-3 presentation layer. You'll now see:

• Programmes — every <audioProgramme> in the file, with audioProgrammeLanguage + locale-aware labels.
• Content groups per programme — Dialogue, Music, Effects, Mixed, etc., each carrying its dialogue classification (BS.2076-3 §5.7.3).
• Complementary object groups — alternative dialogue / commentary / accessibility variants, rendered with their accessibility intent visible.
• Polar coords for polar-authored objects (the renderer always rounds to Cartesian internally, but the sidebar shows you what the file actually declared).

Per-bed solo / mute

Each bed bank now has S/M buttons in its header, so you can solo or mute a whole bed group as easily as you can a single channel. Useful when QC'ing a file with multiple bed-format audioObjects (e.g. a stereo bed + a 5.1.4 bed nested together).

INFO

S/M only affects channels the active programme is currently routing. If you solo a group the active programme isn't including — Audio Description in a programme that doesn't carry it, for example — nothing audible will change.

Per-content-group solo / mute

Solo / mute now fans out via the engine to all tracks in a content group — so soloing "Music" mutes everything that isn't music, regardless of how that music is split across beds, objects, and HOA. Mirror behaviour of any pro QC console.

EBU Production Profile — at-a-glance UI

If the file declares an EBU <profile> (e.g. EBU R128 ADM mode, Tech 3392), Orbit's sidebar now shows whether your file's structure meets the declared profile's requirements. Saves you from hopping into the AXML inspector for routine spec checks.

Smaller polish

• Polar-authored objects display their original spherical coordinates in the sidebar (azimuth / elevation / distance), even though the renderer interpolates in Cartesian.
• Object time-windows clip the All-Tracks waveform display — empty space outside an object's start/duration no longer draws as if there's silent audio there.
• AXML inspector deep-compliance pass — a longer-tail QC sweep through the AXML inspector for production-profile fields ahead of v1.5.

Known follow-ups

• Cache rebuild for old sessions — sessions opened in 1.4.0 keep their existing waveform pyramids until rebuilt. Use Debug → Rebuild Waveform + Peak Caches if you see deep-zoom gaps.
• Matrix typeDefinition — not yet implemented (noted in the BS.2076-3 compliance audit).

---

1.4.1 (beta)

Released 2026-05-16, as a beta on top of 1.4.0. Everything here is in 1.4.2.

A focused bug-fix beta. Three things that had been getting in the way of importing large ADM masters into sessions are sorted — and the engine underneath is now fully JUCE-free.

Leaner, faster engine under the hood

Orbit's audio engine no longer relies on the JUCE cross-platform framework — it now talks to macOS's audio system directly. Nothing about how you use Orbit changes, but the app is smaller on disk, quicker to launch, and lighter on system resources. Behaviour across every monitoring mode and every export path is identical to 1.4.0.

Large masters (RF64 / >4 GB) now import cleanly

If you've ever dragged a big ADM master into a session and watched the sidebar peaks stay blank with a permanent "Indexing tracks…" spinner — only for them to appear after closing and re-opening the session — that's fixed.

The background waveform indexer was rejecting files that used any of the formats common in long-form / high-rate masters:

• RF64 / BW64 containers (mandatory for anything above 4 GB).
• IEEE float 32-bit samples.
• WaveFormatExtensible headers.

All three now load the same way a vanilla RIFF file does. Sidebar peaks appear as soon as the background pass finishes, no reopen required.

Waveform gaps past 8× zoom

At deep zoom, every waveform — Spatial, All Tracks, per-bed, per-object — was showing thin vertical bars with regular blank gaps instead of a filled-in shape. The deeper you zoomed past ~8×, the more obvious it got.

The peak pyramid that powers waveform rendering was leaving most of its high-resolution buckets at zero whenever the source data had fewer samples than the target zoom level needed (the common case for the spatial bus). The renderer treated those zeros as silence and skipped them, producing the gaps. Pyramids now fall back to the nearest source bucket instead of zero, so every pixel of every zoom level gets a real value.

Existing sessions

Cached waveform pyramids built with the old code still look gappy until rebuilt. Use Debug → Rebuild Waveform + Peak Caches on each session to regenerate them.

Single-scanner architecture

In 1.4.0, opening a session sometimes triggered two waveform scans for the same file — one in the foreground and one in the background — racing each other and causing the sidebar peaks to flicker or stay blank until reopen. They're now consolidated into a single background scanner that owns the cache write end to end, with the foreground reading from it as soon as it finishes.

You shouldn't notice the change directly, except that:

• Sidebar peaks now populate on first open of a session — no reopen needed.
• The Rebuild Waveform + Peak Caches command actually finishes (it used to crash the app on press).

---

Upgrading

Orbit 1.4.2 is a free update for existing users. The minimum macOS version is unchanged (macOS 14 Sonoma).

Looking for the previous release notes? See What's New in v1.4.0. For the 1.5 line, see What's New in v1.5.