The track preview modal could hold a machine at 25% GPU. Three separate
causes, each measured in isolation with a kill-style ladder and, once the
GPU-engine counter proved to be clock-relative (a lighter workload read
HIGHER), with clock-immune process CPU-seconds.
Idle drain. The scrim's backdrop-filter is re-executed on every presented
frame -- a backdrop filter is never cached -- so its cost is presents/sec
times window area. Two infinite animations kept the modal presenting at the
display's refresh rate forever: the eq capsule's bars animated `height` (a
layout property, so style/layout/paint on the main thread every vsync) and
the cover glow's halo-breathe kept a blur(48px) copy recompositing. Either
one alone kept the pipeline hot, which is why killing one changed nothing.
The glow is deleted outright at Kyle's request; the eq bars now scale with
a stepped transform whose three delays are multiples of the step interval,
so all three jump on the same instants and one present serves them all.
Playing steady state: 7.2-10.5% of a core down to 1.4-2.2%. Paused: 0.2%.
Scrolling. The animations turned out to be innocent here -- reverting them
moved the number not at all. The cost was per-step work: re-decoding the
full artwork for the background wash, a main-thread accent scan, a new
cover mount, three times a second. The wash is now a 96x58 canvas with the
blur/saturate/brightness baked in at draw time and cached per artwork, and
an overlay preloader walks the manifest once at open -- nearest to the
active card first, capped at 60 -- filling the decoded-image, wash and
accent caches ahead of the user. A rapid-nav jump-cut was tried and
rejected on sight; the animations stay full at every rate.
Backend. preview_resolve swept the clip directory on every call, and any
landing outside the +/-1 prefetch window paid a full Deezer mint, download,
validate, write and loudness measure. The fetch-store-measure core is
factored out and a new preview_prewarm walks the session's track ids at
open, paced 250ms on top of the existing Deezer throttle and starting 1.5s
in so the first clip owns the network, halted by a generation guard on
dispose. A burst landing on a never-visited track is now audible in 154ms
off local disk. The sweep is throttled to ten minutes, and dispose deletes
prewarmed files instead of orphaning them until the hourly reap.
The debug overlay's GPU row was summing the counters machine-wide, so it
read roughly double the app's share with Discord and DWM folded in. It now
reports `app X% - sys Y%`, the app figure restricted to our process tree,
matching Task Manager's per-process rows.
The third action in the preview modal's control row has been a disabled
stub since the modal landed -- there was nowhere for it to go until the
album page existed. It goes there now.
The target is the item's own provider `albumId`, never a title match, so a
top-tracks preview lands on the exact record the modal's metadata line is
already naming: Elephant Gym's "Light" opens Angle, and AC/DC's "Highway
to Hell" the album rather than any of the compilations carrying it. The
manifest has carried `albumId` and an `actions.openAlbum` flag from the
start; all 20 rows of a Deezer top-track payload declare one.
The navigation lands on the previewed TRACK, not just the record -- the
album page's existing pending-track flash does the scrolling and the
highlight, the same landing the now-playing song link already gets.
Three details that are not obvious:
- The overlay must not import state.svelte.js (the module comment on
previewSession explains the cycle), so the navigator is injected by the
page exactly as `playFull` already is.
- Both ids are read out of previewUi and the snapshot BEFORE the close, not
after: closePreview() nulls the callback and drops the snapshot the
active item came from. And the close happens first, because the session
holds the audio focus and navigating under an open dialog would land the
new page behind the scrim.
- contracts.js freezes every manifest id as a String, while `catalog_album`
takes a u64 -- a JSON string fails to deserialize -- and the album page's
flash compares track ids with ===. Both cross back to numbers in
openAlbumFromPreviewItem, once, rather than at each call site.
An album session is already standing on the record it would open, so the
button greys out there with "You're already on this album" rather than
re-navigating to the page underneath. The decision is made from the
manifest's own contextKey, so it holds for any future surface that opens an
album-kind session. The album page still supplies the navigator, so a row
that ever declares a different album goes somewhere instead of being
silently dead.
Verified in the running app over CDP: artist top-tracks preview -> click ->
lands on Highway to Hell (id 9410086), pendingTrackId 92719900 as a Number,
matching track found on the page, .trow.flash present, modal gone, and the
glass bar trail reading Search -> AC/DC -> Highway to Hell. From an album
session the button is disabled and a click changes nothing. 85 JS tests
pass.
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.
Opening the preview faded the main track out at focus-acquire time, but the
first preview clip only becomes audible after resolve/load/decode — so on
the way IN the 340 ms main fade completed into silence before the preview
arrived (a gap the user heard; the exit was already fine).
The main fade is now deferred: focusBridge.requestSilence only arms the
commitment and grants; coordinator.beginMainSilence performs the actual
fade-pause, and the service fires it from afterChange on the opening
session's first audible clip (or ITEM_FAILED). Main-cos-out then overlaps
preview-sin-in — a true cross. resumeMain skips the fade-resume when the
fade never fired (close before audible), and beginMainSilence re-checks the
main is sounding before fading. The focus coordinator's acquisition logic
and tests are untouched.
Verified live: preview audible at 275 ms, main played until then, faded
~343 ms, paused at 618 ms and held frozen; close resumed from the exact
position in 15 ms.
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.
Working:
- PreviewOverlay.svelte mounted at app root; opens over a fixture manifest
(window.__previewFixture(n) in dev), inert background, player bar hidden,
focus trap, keyboard nav, F3 rail, T3 swaps, R1b capsule, accent extraction.
- previewSession.svelte.js: store + service wiring (production + fixture).
- Root integration in App.svelte; revision-gateway bumps + notePlaybackGeneration
threaded through state.svelte.js player entry points; api.win guarded so plain
vite browser mounts.
- Launcher on the artist page builds a real artist manifest and opens the modal
with a play-full starter.
- 70 JS tests still green.
Two bugs found and fixed during bring-up:
- effect_update_depth_exceeded: bleed-crossfade and bump effects read AND wrote
the same $state; wrapped writes in untrack(). This loop was breaking Svelte's
scheduler globally (even ui.* stopped reacting).
- accentFromImage now sets crossOrigin for remote covers.
KNOWN BROKEN (handoff): reel vertical centering. The active card stays centred
at index 0 but drifts by one stride per step. Root cause isolated — see
TODO-Feature-Docs/scrollable-track-previews/HANDOFF-PHASE2C.md.
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.
src/lib/preview/ — framework-free ESM modules, per design §12–14:
- contracts.js: versioned manifest/item/source-ref factories; signed
URLs structurally excluded from manifests; Apple identity first-class.
- lease.js: discriminated MediaLease union; computeSafeForMs derives
lifetimes provider-clock-first with fallback/contradiction handling
(margins are ADRs backed by Phase 0 soak evidence).
- redact.js: URL redaction (host+hash+exp only) and the HTTPS + exact
host allowlist gate applied to initial URLs and every redirect.
- manifest.js: artist (rank order, exact-id dedupe), album (disc/track
sort, context inheritance) and fixture builders — pure, no fetching.
- session.js: reducer with session/generation guards on every async
action; keyed active item with derived playable indices/cursor;
auto-advance under fresh generations; close is terminal.
- resolver.js: PreviewResolver contract + scripted fixture resolver
with classified failures (stale_lease/not_found/network/…).
- transport.js: transport seam + deterministic fake (manual ticks).
- focus.js: revision gateway (all main-player entry points; focus-
internal tag) and the coordinator — acquisition only via a
generation-bound silence ack, restore only with revisions unchanged.
tests/preview/*.test.mjs run via `npm test` (node --test): 61 passing,
covering the full Phase 1 list in IMPLEMENTATION-PLAN §6 including the
exit gate: stale lease/play events are inert, no restoration after any
simulated main command, and no component renders anywhere.
KeelrLeek