Release Notes

This page contains information about the changes in different versions (releases) and plans for the future.

Releases

Version 2.7.1 (2026-02-27)

New Features

  • Toggle black screen during presentation: A new button in the presentation control bar lets you instantly blank the screen to black and restore it again. The keyboard shortcut B has the same effect.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed memory leaks: DestroyPresentationStyleSettings was a no-op and never freed the owned TFont, causing fonts to leak on every presentation start, style preview refresh, and image export.
  • Fixed a SIGSEGV crash when closing Cantara while a presentation was active: FormHide was firing during form destruction (after FormDestroy had already freed objects), leading to null pointer dereferences via PresentationCanvas and invalid window handle accesses.
  • Replaced all bare .Destroy calls in destructors and FormDestroy handlers with FreeAndNil to guard against nil pointer crashes during teardown.
  • Fixed a memory leak in TLoadImageThread: the stored TPresentationStyleSettings.Font was never freed when overwritten by a new LoadData call.
  • Fixed a memory leak in TfrmSettings.gbPresentationClick: the existing preview canvas was not freed before creating a new one.

Version 2.7.0 (2026-02-21)

New Features

  • Per-song style overrides: Each song in the selection can now have its own background image, background colour, text colour, font, transparency, and horizontal alignment — independent of the global presentation settings. A dedicated “Song Style” dialog is accessible via the right-click context menu on any song.
  • Per-song PPTX masters: When exporting to PowerPoint, each song can use its own custom master slide.
  • Fade transition between slides: A smooth cross-fade effect between slides can be enabled in the settings. The fade duration is configurable (default: 150 ms).
  • Black screen on empty slide: A new setting causes Cantara to show a pure black screen instead of the background when an empty slide is displayed.
  • JSON song selection export/import: Song selections can now be saved and loaded as .json files. The format bundles song content, per-song style overrides, and background images into a single portable file, enabling full round-trip export/import across machines.
  • Windows dark mode: Cantara now follows the system dark mode setting on Windows.
  • Windows installer: An Inno Setup installer is now available for Windows.
  • Third-party libraries dialog: A new dialog lists all third-party libraries used by Cantara along with their licences.

Improvements

  • Improved Flatpak permissions handling: Cantara now uses the XDG portal for file access in sandboxed environments and provides a standard open dialog for selecting background images.
  • Improved text rendering with a custom word-wrap function for more accurate line breaking.
  • Improved font rendering quality settings.
  • Updated and extended translations.
  • The main window title has been simplified to “Cantara”.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a crash (SIGSEGV) when starting a presentation after songs were added via “Select All” or drag-and-drop, or after using the search filter — the TRepoFile object reference was not attached to list entries in those code paths.
  • Fixed the song editor not opening the correct song when invoked from the context menu (wrong file lookup and a form initialisation timing issue).
  • Fixed background colour and transparency changes not being reflected in the song style preview dialog.
  • Fixed background colour and transparency changes not being applied in the presentation window and image export when two songs share the same background image but use different colours.
  • Fixed metadata parsing truncating field values that contained a colon character.
  • Fixed a layout overlap of the background colour panel and an incorrect sign on the transparency value in the song style dialog.
  • Fixed a type cast error in the PPTX custom master slide lookup.
  • Fixed an exception when closing the application under certain conditions.
  • Fixed .txt files not being recognised as valid song files.
  • Fixed several text sizing and line-length calculation issues in the presentation canvas.
  • Fixed a content-area layout bug affecting Cantara running as a Flatpak.

Version 2.6.0 (2024-05-31)

  • Migrate to bgrabitmap for better handling and displaying of the presentation slides. In the future, further text effects like shadows etc. can be easily implemented.
  • Redesign the multi screen presentation controller: In addition to the songs, every slide with content is listed and can be selected directly.
  • Context menu of presentation window: Fullscreen and ending of presentation is now also selectable with that menu.
  • Minor improvements of the song editor and full text search.
  • Add “Select all Songs” under File menu in song selection.
  • Bugfix: Wrong display of presentation when no specific font has been selected #24
  • Bugfix: Drag and Drop exception in song selection window
  • Bugfix: Wrong escaping of special characters in pptx-export
  • A lot of minor bugfixes and corrections
  • Translation update

Version 2.5.0 (2023-08-21)

  • Complete rewriting of large parts of the source code including the internal structures for generating and painting presentation slides
  • Improvement of the presentation layout
  • Improvement of the song editor
  • Implementation of a preview of the presentation in the settings menu
  • Implementation of slide export to pptx (using PptxgenJs)
  • Implementation of slide export to pictures
  • Implementation of song lyrics export to markup text files
  • Implementation of a full text search for browsing song lyrics
  • Implementation of a two language song presentation
  • Improvements of the presentation window and control (more keys and remote controls are supported)
  • Fix issue #17
  • Cantara can now be directly opened with a .songtex-file.

Version 2.4.1 (2023-01-30) Italian and Spanish translation

The version 2.4.1. adds Italian and Spanish translation to Cantara. Despite that, there is no additional functionality compared to Version 2.4.0 which means that if you are not using one of the languages, you don’t necessarily need to update to this version.

Thank you to the translators!

Thank you for the effort!

Version 2.4.0 (2023-01-06)

Version 2.4 is finally there! Beside new features, it also brings a lot of bug fixes. See the list below for details.

Improvements/Enhancements

  • A new editor has been implemented which allows editing of the songs, converting CCLI songs into the song format, creating new songs, archiving them and cloning them (e.g. for different versions).
  • A welcome assistant will guide new users after the first start of Cantara to setup and understand the program.
  • Cantara can automatically break long slides into two pages if configured in the settings.
  • The newly implemented SongTeX file format allows to export songs slides with the song lyrics and the order.

Bug Fixes

  • Floating point errors when no background picture was selected
  • Loading the slides took a long time if a background was selected

Version 2.3.2 (2022-11-10)

This is a minor release which brings two small but useful improvements:

  • Completion of traditional Chinese translation
  • readiness for Flatpak

Check the corresponding GitHub page for details.

Version 2.3.1 (2022-08-12)

This is a minor release and follow up on version 2.3

Improvements

  • Version 2.3.1 brings support for background images. These can be adjusted and made transparent (towards the background color) or brighter.

Bug Fixes

  • fix of spell mistake in CCLI license tag. It is now ccli-licensenumber
  • complete German translation

Version 2.3 (2022-08-02)

After testing and further development, version 2.3 can be released.

Improvements:

  • Support of the CCLI songselect format*
  • Support for Metadata which can be displayed dynamically during the song
  • Improvements in source code
  • Preparations for further development in source code, abstractions
  • Bugfixes in displaying the songs

As always, I am looking forward to feedback, suggestions and bug reports. Thank you!

Go to Github page of the Release