Our client keeps no cookie jar, so every Bing read arrived with the
adult-content preference undefined -- and in that state Bing answers with
wholly unrelated cached result sets. Four identical back-to-back reads of
"Fishmans band photo" returned porn, an Indonesian guitar-chord page, porn
again, and a printable 2026 calendar, each internally coherent with honest
titles and page urls.
Measured 27/27 reads with zero relevant cards without the flag and 27/27
correct with it, across three artists, three waves and three repeats. Only
strict works; moderate and off behave exactly like sending nothing. Strict
costs no relevance (Partiboi69 scores 34/35) and it also keeps explicit
imagery out of the candidate pool, which until now only the identity gate
was stopping.
This failure was misdiagnosed twice -- first as a poisoned IP, then as Bing
rate limiting -- because with no cookie our requests are byte-identical
every time, so all the variability lived in Bing's cache. That is why it
appeared to break and heal on its own with no code change.
Camping in Alaska, Fishmans and Partiboi69 now resolve real heroes again.
The Bing hero tier currently returns no banner for artists it used to cover.
Every gate in the candidate loop is a silent `continue`, so a tier that throws
away all 525 parsed results looks identical to Bing returning nothing at all —
which is why this has now read as a fresh regression four times without anything
being able to confirm or deny it.
Emit HERO_GATES alongside HERO_WAVE: what was parsed, what was accepted, and the
count discarded by each gate, plus the first few identity rejections in full.
That immediately separates "our filter broke" from "Bing sent us junk".
It says the second one. For Camping in Alaska: parsed=525, accepted=0,
identity=510 — and the rejected cards are campground photos from recreation.gov
and thedyrt.com. Partiboi69 returns Bruce Lee wallpapers, Fishmans returns Tommy
Fury boxing coverage, Hermeth returns aesthetic quote wallpapers. The results are
unrelated to the query and to each other, so the identity gate is doing exactly
its job: refusing to hang another person's face on the artist.
Confirmed outside the app, straight from curl. Zero query-relevant result cards
on any variant — with and without qft/form/first/cc/setlang/tsc, with full
browser client-hint and sec-fetch headers, and against the /images/async grid
endpoint the page itself uses. The async endpoint answers "Fishmans band photo"
with AI-course ads and "Partiboi69 band photo" with celebrity photoshoots. Our
url is well formed and the parser is fine: `q` is properly encoded, and cards
still parse (252-525 of them). Bing is simply no longer honouring the query for
this client.
Also stop one bad answer from sticking. Bing serves the SAME url a card-less
page on one read and 25-80 cards on the next, and browser_html caches whatever
came back for CATALOG_TTL — so a single degraded response left an artist
heroless for fifteen minutes. A wave that parses to nothing now drops the cached
page and asks once more. This does not address the wrong-results failure above;
it removes a compounding one found while chasing it.
No hero behaviour is changed by this commit.
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.
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.
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.
Player::pause_acked() returns a generation-bound PauseAck applied on the
audio thread; a desired-paused latch makes an in-flight decoder come up
paused instead of auto-starting, closing the window where a pause lands
during decode setup. Proven live by examples/focus_ack_probe.rs:
ack-while-playing freezes position; ack-while-buffering never becomes
audible; resume clears the latch; plain pause() during buffering is
demonstrated to auto-start (pre-existing hazard, filed separately).
Transport ADR recorded (native), Phase 0 marked complete in the plan.
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