Arion 1.0.1
A focused maintenance release driven by a structured QA pass against 1.0.0. Every change in this release is a real customer-visible bug fix or UX improvement — no new features, no breaking changes for existing customers.
Bug fixes
- Expired licenses now fall back to Personal mode instead of locking the application out entirely. Family or Archive customers whose subscription lapses can keep searching their existing index at Tier 1 while they renew. Genuinely corrupt license files (signature failure, malformed payload) still hard-stop, since those are integrity failures rather than lifecycle states.
- Removable drives no longer silently re-index after reconnect. When a configured scan root is unreachable (offline external drive, disconnected network share), background scans now skip the prune phase for records under that root and emit a clear "Scan root unreachable" status. Previously the daily scan would purge the entire index for that drive and re-extract everything on next reconnect.
- Excel 97-2003 (
.xls) files now extract correctly. Previously listed as supported but silently failed because the underlying library only handles.xlsx. Now routed through LibreOffice headless, consistent with how.doc,.odt, and.odsare handled. - Tools → Prune Excluded now honors
"Excluded Folder Names" patterns (e.g.
Cache,node_modules) in addition to full-path entries. Previously only the full-path list drove the prune. - Switching the Ollama embedding model now
works correctly for any model, not just the default
nomic-embed-text. The native context window is auto-detected per model, and previously-bundled queries that would silently return a dimension-mismatch error now show an actionable "Run Tools → Build Semantic Index" message. - Archive members (files inside
.zip,.cbz,.tar) now index correctly. A regression in 1.0.0 caused a silentNameErrorduring archive-member indexing; archive contents will be picked up on the next scan after upgrade. - Disk-low and Personal-cap-reached aborts now keep their warning visible at the end of the scan instead of being clobbered by "Last scan ended: just now".
- Tier 3 ChromaDB index now writes to
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Chordalia\Arion\<config>\ arion_vectors\on every install (a path-resolution bug previously left it pointing atProgram Files\Arion\ arion_vectors\, which is read-only on standard Windows installs).
UX improvements
- License-error dialogs no longer duplicate the support contact line.
- Settings → Search Tier — selecting Tier 2 or Tier 3 with no configuration shows a "Configure (Tier N)" shortcut button that switches to the relevant config tab, instead of a dead-end "Test Connection" button that fails when there's nothing to test.
- Settings → Ollama dropdowns now filter to model types appropriate to each slot — chat models for the Chat dropdown, embedding models for the Embedding dropdown.
- Launching a second Arion on a machine with a single existing config (Family+) opens the config picker with a "Create New…" shortcut instead of a dead-end warning.
- Large archive scans now show per-member progress in the status bar instead of appearing frozen on the archive's filename for minutes at a time.
- System Status diagnostics distinguishes missing packages, bundled-but-broken native dependencies, and successful loads — with troubleshooting hints appropriate to each state.
- Cleaner log output — directory-walk lines are no longer
at
INFOlevel (they were drowning out search activity, license events, and scheduler decisions). Embedded model name now appears in the per-Ask context log.
Installation prerequisites
Tier 3 (Local AI) requires the Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2022 Redistributable (x64). Most modern Windows machines already have it installed; if Settings → System Status reports a bundled-but-failed-to-load library, install vc_redist.x64.exe from Microsoft and restart Arion. CPUs from before roughly 2013 may also lack the AVX2 instructions required by the Tier 3 components.
Notable change for Family Edition
Video and audio transcription is temporarily
unavailable. Arion 1.0.1 ships without the
speech-to-text engine. The standard build no longer bundles
faster-whisper and its native dependencies. An
on-demand installer for the transcription engine — shared
with Cadenzium and downloaded once per machine — is
planned for 1.0.2. Until then, video (.mp4,
.mkv, etc.) and audio (.mp3,
.wav, etc.) files are skipped during scans on
Family Edition. Settings → Video & Audio shows an
explanatory note when the engine isn't installed.
Planned for 1.0.2
· On-demand transcription engine installer — opt-in download of the faster-whisper engine and its dependencies, restoring video and audio indexing for Family Edition. Shared with Cadenzium, so customers who own both products download the engine once.
· Tier 3 integration test pass — an automated smoke-test harness for the local AI path so silent failures (missing native modules, embedding-model configuration mismatches) get caught before release rather than during launch testing.