TheAudioDB records are held to a cross-provider identity test because a shared
name is not evidence -- namesakes are the bug it protects against. But it
demanded that TheAudioDB's MBID EQUAL the MB artist Deezer links to, and treated
any other id as a different act.
MusicBrainz carries duplicate entries for the same artist more often than that
assumes. Roosevelt has two -- 84825fb6 and d7eecee2, both "Roosevelt", Person,
DE, "German producer & DJ from Cologne". Deezer links the first, TheAudioDB
references the second, so his logo was discarded as belonging to someone else.
The rescue keeps names untrusted, which is the entire point of the gate: when
the ids disagree it asks whether TheAudioDB's OWN MusicBrainz entry links back
to the Deezer artist being resolved. d7eecee2 lists
https://www.deezer.com/artist/85901 among its url relations -- two MB entries
pointing at one Deezer id are the same act whatever their ids say. It only runs
when the cheap checks fail and it rides the shared cached artist lookup, so the
hot path is unchanged.
A linked MBID still outranks TheAudioDB's own strDeezerID, which can be stale
(`linked_mbid_outranks_stale_audiodb_deezer_id` covers that and still passes) --
the doc comment's "either ... or" describes a precedence the code deliberately
does not have.
Manifest recipe bumped to v5, or artists cached under v4 keep serving the
logo-less result this build would now fill. Safe now that a stale-recipe
manifest survives as a floor rather than being deleted on read.
Roosevelt: 0 logos -> 1 (his TheAudioDB logo). Verified unchanged: Fishmans 5,
King Gizzard 7, Wednesday 4, Pond 1, Ross from Friends 1, Camping in Alaska 0
(genuinely has none).
Both regressions were invisible because the pipeline's failure mode is a shrug:
no logo, no error, fall back to plain text.
1. The dominance guard was resolution-dependent. It bins the crop into a coarse
16-cubed RGB histogram and rejects when the dominant colour holds under half
the pixels ("text over a photo"). A BIGGER source resolves more grain and
JPEG texture, which spreads pixels across bins and shrinks that share -- so
the identical crop of Alvvays' "Blue Rev" measures dominance 0.746 at 1000px
and 0.226 at 3000px. Once the upgrade path started supplying hi-res artwork,
covers that had segmented cleanly for months began failing a guard that had
not changed; its input grew. The histogram and guard now read a copy
normalised to the 1000px they were calibrated at, while the alpha ramp still
runs at full resolution -- which is the whole reason for fetching the larger
cover.
2. Only the top 14 covers were ever offered. The rank puts albums first and
penalises remix/mix/edit/live titles, but a prolific artist's wordmark is
often on exactly those: Poolside has 74 releases and SEVEN covers that OCR
reads as "POOLSIDE", every one of them outside a 14-cover window. The cap
goes to 40 on both sides (the frontend list must not undercut the backend's,
since whatever it trims the extractor can never see). This is free for
artists that hit early -- the locate loop stops at COVER_LOGO_MAX_HITS -- and
is paid once, then cached, by artists with no wordmark at all.
Recovered: Alvvays (nothing -> 871x173), Poolside (nothing -> 528x225),
Men I Trust, and Motor City Drum Ensemble now extracts too. Verified no
regression across the rest of the research roster: Camping in Alaska, Crazy P,
Folamour, Hot Toddy, Mildlife, Session Victim, Turnover, Knocked Loose,
Snail Mail, Spiritbox and Todd Terje all still extract at their previous sizes.
Every persisted mask predates the anti-aliasing the trace path now relies on,
so without this bump a cached artist keeps rendering from a near-binary mask
while the tracer runs at the lighter blur that assumes real gradients -- the
worst of both. The key already hashes the recipe, so old entries simply miss.
The wordmark segmentation mapped alpha with smoothstep(46, 120) over distance
from the background colour. That ceiling is fixed, but the ink distance is not:
white text on a black band sits at ~438, so every edge pixel brighter than about
27% grey saturated to fully opaque. A hard threshold wearing a smoothstep's
clothing. Measured on Camping in Alaska's "Needlemouth" cover, the extracted
mask's edges transitioned over 0.10px against the source's 0.88px -- nine times
harder than the artwork it came from.
The ramp's top now tracks the measured ink distance (95th percentile of
distance-from-background, so it reads the glyph body rather than the brightest
speck), with the old constant kept as a floor so low-contrast marks are
untouched. Retained anti-aliasing on that cover goes from 10.4% of inked pixels
to 22.2%, and the glyphs thin back toward the source instead of being dilated by
the saturation.
That unlocks the trace side, which is the visible half. The blur there was never
a goal -- it exists to synthesise anti-aliasing a mask lacks, and it melts serif
terminals into blobs. With real gradients in the alpha, the cover-logo branch
drops from ~0.93px of blur to a 0.5px floor and from eps 0.5 to 0.2, at a 2400px
raster instead of 1400. Lowering eps ALONE was tried and rejected: against the
old near-binary mask it just captured the pixel staircase in finer detail.
Camping in Alaska's traced path goes 900 -> ~2500 vertices with no staircasing,
and the serif terminals keep their shape. Cost is 35ms -> 65ms of main-thread
work, once per cover-derived logo at page load, not per frame.
An artist's hero was re-discovered every 24 hours through a tier that fails
per-name, and the stale manifest was deleted on the way in -- before the
replacement lookup had run. So one bad discovery day did not merely fail to
refresh a hero, it destroyed the good one first and left the artist blank.
On this machine that took the persisted store from 26 artists down to 3;
Crazy P, MSPAINT, Sword II, Hermeth, Billy Cobb, Pond, Weezer, Daft Punk and
King Krule all had correct banners on disk that nothing would ever read again.
Three changes:
- The manifest TTL goes from 24 hours to 30 days, matching the cover
resolution horizon. A press photo is still the artist's press photo a month
later; it does not go stale the way metadata does.
- Reading a manifest no longer destroys it. Stale and older-recipe manifests
are retained as a floor and only replaced once a lookup returns something
better, which also migrates them forward to the current recipe. Only files
that are unusable -- oversized, unparseable, or belonging to another artist
-- are removed.
- A failed hero discovery is detected by an EMPTY BANNER LIST, not a None:
catalog_artist_art returns Some as soon as the Deezer profile resolves, so
the previous None check could never fire, and an empty result would also
overwrite good banners whenever logos were present.
Also widens discovery so fewer artists need the floor at all. The query ladder
gains the bare artist name: decorated queries can collapse a rare artist onto a
popular entity sharing a word -- every "Hana Vu ... photo" phrasing returns the
Japanese group HANA (525 of 525 cards, quoting included), while the bare name
returns her real press photos with 16 of 17 passing the identity gate as
Strong. The gate, not the query, is what filters.
And a near-empty Bing page now counts as degraded. The retry test was
is_empty(), which let the commonest degraded shape through: a one-card page of
something unrelated, cached as that artist's verdict for a quarter hour.
Measured 15 of 30 waves for MSPAINT and Billy Cobb. The richer of the two
reads is kept so a thin retry cannot lose a good first answer.
Verified live: Crazy P, MSPAINT, Sword II and Hermeth all render heroes again.
Clicking a track could play silently: the store showed status=playing with
the position advancing and no error, but the sink was at volume 0. The
open/close crossfade ramped the main player's USER VOLUME as its fade
channel and left it at 0 on an ack timeout (or when a track change
suppressed the close resume). User volume persists across tracks and a new
Play doesn't reset it, so every later click played at 0 while the slider
still read 0.7.
Give the main player a separate fade_gain channel (Cmd::SetFadeGain, sink =
volume * norm * fade_gain), reset to 1 by every Play/Stop. The open/close
fades ramp fade_gain instead of set_volume (their volume arg is gone, JS
callers too), so the user volume is never touched -- store and backend can't
desync -- and a clicked track always resets fade_gain to 1, so it can never
be stranded silent. fade_resume lands exactly at 1. Player::fade_gain()
mirrors it into a report atomic; debug overlay shows main fade + this proved
the fix live (open 1->0, close 0->1, new track 1.0, volume steady at 0.7).
39 app + 12 player + 85 JS tests pass.
Deezer preview clips are cut from the raw master (not pre-normalized), so
they played several dB hotter than the user's normalized -14 LUFS files —
measured across one artist the previews ranged -0.1 to -8.8 dB from target,
an 8.7 dB spread, so a flat offset would have been wrong either way.
Each clip is now measured with the same BS.1770 meter the main player uses
(preview.rs measure_clip_gain -> loudness::normalization_gain_db) right after
it is written in preview_resolve -- off the async worker, and fully off the
playback path on a prefetched neighbour. The linear gain is stored in the
lease and the reuse cache, and rides UNDER the app-volume mirror per voice
(effective = target_vol * clip_gain), so it composes with the slider, mute
and the crossfade (each clip crosses in at its own matched level). Gated on
the volume_normalization setting; reset on dispose. Debug overlay PREVIEW row
now shows the active clip's norm dB.
Verified live: per-clip gains -0.1..-8.8 dB applied; mute still zeroes the
preview; 39 app + 12 player tests pass.
The preview backend never received a volume — clips played at the crate
default (0.7) regardless of the slider, even muted. The session now sets
the preview volume from the app store (mute → 0) before the first load and
mirrors it live while the modal is open; the debug overlay's PREVIEW row
exposes the backend's resting volume as proof.
The player-bar volume (and fallback seek) fill is now always the accent
color — matching the waveform scrubber's played region — stepping up to
the hover shade on hover instead of white-until-hover.
Also syncs package-lock to the soulstream name + alpha version.
Preview modal audio, five rounds:
- True track-change crossfade: scheduleSettle no longer silences the
outgoing clip at t=0; preview_load's equal-power fade owns both ramps,
gated on the incoming voice's first Playing event (audible_marks), with
failure/overstay fallbacks. CROSSFADE_MS = 340 — locked to the reel's
card-slide so audio and visuals land together.
- Two-neighbour lease prefetch + a 15-min on-disk clip byte-cache
(recent_clips): steps in BOTH directions crossfade in ~15 ms; revisits
never re-download.
- Adaptive settle (isolated steps fire immediately, bursts coalesce) and
anticipatory auto-advance (step at clip end minus 400 ms) so auto-play
crossfades over the tail instead of gapping.
- Session resume memory: revisited tracks continue where they left off
(decoder-level start offset via play_local_from/resume_at); finished
tracks restart from the top.
- Open/close crossfades with the MAIN player: fade-pause with the
desired-paused latch landing at ramp end, fade-resume from the paused
position; MAIN_FADE_GEN guards; focus handshake relaxation documented
in focusBridge.
Volume normalization (Settings > Playback, default on):
- Dependency-free BS.1770/EBU R128 meter in the player crate (K-weighting,
400 ms gated blocks, incremental) + analyzer that reads the same growing
file playback streams from — first plays are measured at download speed.
- Gain layered under user volume; audible start GATED on a preliminary
measurement (10 s of audio or 800 ms budget) so the level is right from
the first sample and never changes mid-track; prelim boosts capped 3 dB,
peak-aware clipping guard, persistent loudness-cache.json.
- Gapless boundaries get their own sample-accurate gain via
SetNextNormGainDb, fed by preload analysis.
Debug overlay (Ctrl+Shift+D): process-tree CPU / PDH GPU / working-set +
private-commit RAM / network rates / FPS / current-track download progress
read from the backend's own StreamProgress / live normalization state /
preview session phase. Polls only while visible.
131 JS + player + app tests green; every path verified live over CDP.
.gitignore now excludes everything that is not part of the app itself:
memory/, research/, TODO-Feature-Docs/, HANDOFF*/GAMEPLAN notes, .codex/,
.claude/ and logs. Version begins the alpha line at 0.1.0-alpha.1 across
the cargo workspace, package.json and tauri.conf.json.
Rust (2A):
- metadata: deezer_track_uncached (fresh mint, cache-updating, paced) and
fetch_preview_media — dedicated client whose custom redirect policy
re-validates every hop against the media allowlist; bounded body read
(cap enforced on received bytes, not Content-Length's promise); Date
header captured for provider-clock lease math. httpdate dep added.
- src-tauri/preview.rs: second Player instance + soulstream:preview event
channel; preview_resolve (fresh mint → host gate → MIME gate → ID3v2
shell strip → MPEG sync check → clip file + opaque lease id → safe_for_ms
mirroring lease.js); preview_load with start_paused via the
desired-paused latch; preview_control/dispose; player_pause_acked
exposing the Phase 0.4 ack on the MAIN player. 9 unit tests.
JS (2B):
- api.js: preview command surface (opaque lease ids only).
- nativeTransport.js: stamps {sessionId, generation, sessionKey} onto
backend events; cleared context makes stragglers dispatch nothing.
- productionResolver.js: DTO → MediaLease, failure classes preserved.
- focusBridge.js: production coordinator binding with the documented
renderer-side generation invariant (buffering counter + gateway).
- service.js: the orchestrator — settle window, resolve→load→play under
focus, single capped retry, one forward lease prefetch with safe-window
expiry, stale re-checks before every transport command, close/handoff.
The service constructs its transport around its own dispatch — the
factory signature exists because a pre-built transport silently loses
the event wiring (caught by test).
70 JS tests passing (npm test); metadata 46 + app preview 9 in cargo.
The previous .git directory was found gutted (only info/ remained), so
history is unrecoverable locally. This commit restores version control
with the tree exactly as it stands: the working app, the preview-tracks
launcher on the artist hero, the scrollable-track-previews design bundle
(docs + approved mockups), and the Phase 0 validation artifacts.
KeelrLeek