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.
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.
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