Captain's log 040 and the pre-compact resume state.

The log's finding, in one line: OPAL-26 sounded broken on SoundCloud while every
rendered file was correct to the millisecond, because SoundCloud will not replace
audio behind a permalink and our uploader is idempotent — so every re-upload
under a fresh slug ADDED a copy. The whole Aug-12 first cut was still up beside
the six correct v4 ones. And the tell PLN was actually reacting to: eight of the
fourteen stale uploads wear cover art and not one of the correct six does. The
superseded audio looked finished. His ear was reading the artwork.

Two lens lessons in it, both recurring. 'Matches to the second' was a tolerance,
not a verdict — SoundCloud reproduces full_duration to the MILLISECOND, so at the
±1.5s a transcode seems to deserve, the Aug-12 and v4 cuts of /wap are the same
track, which is how six stale uploads passed a duration check in August. And roll
call cannot find a stray, because a check that only looks where it expects a
thing can never find that thing somewhere else.

Plus the git one, which cost four commits: this is a shared checkout, another
session moved HEAD between two of my commits, and 'git push origin master' from a
non-master HEAD is a silent no-op that exits 0. The PUSHED in my own log was
something I wrote myself.

The board now carries R1-R5 written for a reader with zero context: exact
commands with paths, the artifacts already on disk so nothing is regenerated,
the three decisions that are PLN's and not a machine's, and the shared-checkout
hazard spelled out before anyone commits into it again.

The argv-only bug is fixed by extracting the 3-rung ladder into
tools/ardour_session.py, imported by both gig-log and check-mix. gig-log's
'keep check-mix in sync' comment is gone because there is nothing left to keep
in sync — one parser per concept satisfied by construction rather than by
somebody remembering. 169 gig-log tests pass unchanged.

Then it ran for real and reported Tidal 07, 08, 10 and 12 at -inf dB in the
saved session. Third recurrence of that bug (04-08+12, then 02+10, now these
four). PLN's parked two-minute check went from unrunnable straight to failing,
which is the whole argument for wiring a check into a caller: it gets run under
conditions the unit test never sees.

Also logged: two pre-existing test failures the suite run made visible
(test_orphan_orbits 16 rows vs 13 expected; test_lcxl3_display collects zero
tests, and a test file that cannot fail is not a passing test), and the
uncommitted duplicates left sitting on claude/rig-streamline so whoever rebases
it does not double-apply them.

    the fader was down in the file, not in the room.
    nobody could hear the difference
    because a closed fader and a silent instrument
    look identical on a post-fader meter.

check-mix.py resolved the live session from argv only, so any Ardour
launched from the GUI's recent-sessions list (bare argv) went unresolved
and check-mix silently fell back to a guessed path. gig-log.py's FilesLens
already solved this with a 3-rung evidence ladder (argv > cwd > open fds,
commit abad7515) and had a sync comment flagging check-mix as needing it.

Extracted the ladder into tools/ardour_session.py — one resolver instead
of two, per feedback_one_parser_per_concept — and made both gig-log.py and
check-mix.py import it. gig-log's FilesLens keeps its instance-level
caching/logging but delegates all evidence-gathering to the shared module;
the now-unnecessary "keep in sync" comment is gone.

Verified: gig-log's 169 pytest tests still pass unchanged (they exercise
all 3 rungs against synthetic /proc fixtures). Live: Ardour was running
("Tidal Live" session, launched with argv), so check-mix.py resolved it
for real and reported per-orbit gains — surfacing the same recurring bug
this fix was meant to catch: Tidal 07/08/10/12 sit at -inf dB in the
currently SAVED session. Rungs 2 (cwd) and 3 (open-fds) were proven against
synthetic fixtures matching the live-rig gap, since the running process's
argv already carried the session path.

master sc delete --manifest exists: dry-run by default, identity verified in
BOTH directions (a permalink that now resolves to a different sc_id is a
refusal, not a warning), public tracks refused, a reason required per entry
because a deletion without provenance is not allowed, batch capped before any
API call, and a receipt that keeps every field plus the on-disk paths of the
archived artwork and the source FLAC. The old test-namespace gate was not
widened — a second gate was added beside it, and a test proves the old one is
unreachable from the new path.

Dry run: 14 deletable, 0 refused. All private, all uploaded in the same minute
on 2026-08-12, and every one still has its FLAC in Opal26_master/tracks/, so
deleting them loses a URL and not a recording. --go is NOT approved yet.

Two caveats recorded loudly rather than buried. The delete TRANSPORT is
unproven: no DELETE has ever been issued from this codebase against api-v2, and
a clean dry run is not evidence the deletes will land. And the generator's first
version lined stale uploads against the newest cut BY TRACK NUMBER — dropping
Desire renumbered REVOLUTION from 15 to 14, so the manifest confidently compared
Desire against REVOLUTION's duration. An unnamed reference, again.

Also logged: four of my own commits landed on a concurrent session's branch
because the shared checkout moved under me, and 'git push origin master' from a
non-master HEAD is a silent no-op that exits 0. Recovered via worktree
cherry-pick without touching their branch or the live tree. The worktree rule in
CLAUDE.md has no orchestrator exemption, which is what I had assumed.

    two sessions, one working tree,
    and a push that said yes to a question
    it had never actually been asked.

The regen moved timecodes by up to 21s (Piment +21.0, REVOLUTION +19.0, Gimme
Acid +16.7). That file is not just website furniture — Slopmotion cuts visuals
to it, so the release videos were pointed a third of a minute off the music on
a third of the record.

The more interesting finding is a parser conflict the regen walked into.
build_gig_tracksjson.py drafts NEW gig pages and never computes the
styleDistribution that LiveEvent.js renders; gig-metadata.py regenerates
existing ones and does. They also disagree outright on REVOLUTION's style
(jazz vs nujazz). Two parsers, one concept — so the board's line that
build_gig_tracksjson 'is now the way to make any gig page' is too strong and
is corrected here rather than left to bite the next regen.

Left explicitly to PLN: whether the OPAL page documents the set as PERFORMED
(15 tracks, Desire included) or as RELEASED (14). Desire has no v4 boundary
because it was cut, so its v3 timecode rides through unverified. A page can
honestly be either thing; only he knows which one he wants a visitor to get.

The first version of this amendment said one OPAL track on SoundCloud was
stale. Then I read the account instead of reasoning about it, and it is
fourteen: the entire Aug-12 first cut is up, thirteen of it under junk
permalinks (/opal26-wap, /12-mafia-12, /ceci-nest-pas-une-bombe) that roll
call could never have found, because roll call only looks where it expects a
track to be. Same error the board made before me, one size smaller.

The finding that explains PLN's ear exactly: eight of the fourteen stale
uploads carry cover art and not one of the six correct v4 tracks does. The
wrong cut is the one that looks finished.

Also corrected: 'every other track matches to the second' was never a verdict,
it was a tolerance. SoundCloud reproduces full_duration to the MILLISECOND, so
at the ±1.5s a transcode seems to deserve, the Aug-12 and v4 cuts of /wap
(361.0 vs 361.6) and /perfect (315.0 vs 314.6) are the same track. That is how
six stale uploads passed a duration check in August.

And two coincidences caught before they could become deletions: /saria-demo
(2025) and /au-revoir-lord-toyota (2020) match OPAL to 50ms by chance on a
132-track account. Duration is a strong discriminator and still not provenance.

    the ones with the cover art were the wrong ones.
    six months of a set played once, and the tell
    was never in the sound -- it was in which
    of the twenty ghosts looked ready.

CLAUDE.md pointed at ../../Web/www/next/content/lives/, which has not existed
since www hoisted the app out of next/ in 6e51fff. The correct path is
../../Web/www/content/lives/{year}/{slug}.md.

This is a worse bug than a typo in docs. The instruction it sits inside is
'Mastering != metadata. Never invent gig metadata... Verify there and cite the
path — if a fact isn't in the canonical source, ask.' A reader who follows the
documented path gets a false 'not found' from the one source they were told to
trust, and the honest next step from there — asking, or worse, filling the gap
from an intermediate script — is exactly the failure the rule was written to
prevent. A stale read is how a Write becomes a delete.

The tide-table scripts already had it right (build_catalog_view.py's LIVES
carries a comment naming the hoist commit); only the instruction was behind.

- process-palette.json wires the editor's command palette to the rig's own
  entrypoints (Init MIDI Channels -> init_midi.sh, and the rest). The whole
  'one entrypoint, fewer files' goal is only real if the editor knows where
  the entrypoints are, so this is rig config, not editor preference.
- sketch.properties points the Processing sketch at its main .pde.
- Logo.xcf is the editable source of the ParVagues mark, from 2025-05. The
  armada design system is documented down to its type stack and its reserved
  brand magenta, and the one file you cannot regenerate from any of that is
  the layered original. 1.2 MB to never have to redraw it.

Deliberately still untracked: TODO.md. It is a paused 2026-06-22 perf/thermal
board, and TASKS_DUMP.md has been the board since 2026-08-16. Committing it
would put a second answer to 'what is next' in the tree, which is the shape
that keeps biting us. PLN's call: fold its two live items into TASKS_DUMP and
delete it, or keep it as a scratch file outside git.

`sc_generation_lens` already knows which OPAL-26 uploads are the Aug-12 first
cut; nothing turned that verdict into something the new `sc delete --manifest`
could execute. This does, and it is the last checkpoint before a destructive
call, so it refuses rather than warns.

In: verdicts starting STALE/ORPHAN (right permalink, wrong cut) plus every
stray (an older cut under another slug). Out, and asserted out: verdict OK
(that IS the ear-verified cut), NOT UPLOADED (nothing to delete), anything
without an sc_id, and everything in `coincidences_discarded` — the lens finds
strays by duration and on a 132-track account two unrelated tracks will share
a length to 50 ms, which is how /au-revoir-lord-toyota (2020, and PUBLIC) and
/saria-demo (2025) both matched an OPAL render. The date floor is re-applied
here instead of trusting the file's own bucket names: two chances to catch a
mistake whose cost is permanent.

Every entry carries a reason citing the evidence, the artwork the pull saved,
and the local render the upload came from — all fourteen resolve to a FLAC in
Opal26_master/tracks/, so deleting these loses a URL and not a recording.

One bug found while writing it, and it is the reason the reason strings matter:
the first version lined a stale upload up against the newest cut BY TRACK
NUMBER, and the Aug-12 cut had fifteen tracks where v4 has fourteen. Dropping
Desire renumbered REVOLUTION from 15 to 14, so the manifest claimed
"#14 Desire, 388.1s vs v4 205.6s" — 205.6s is REVOLUTION's length. A
measurement is a comparison; an unnamed reference cites the wrong track. The
lookup is keyed on the title slug now, and a track absent from the newest cut
says so instead of borrowing a neighbour's duration.

Dry-run against the live account: 14/14 resolved, both directions, all private,
nothing refused. Nothing deleted — that is PLN's call.

Written earlier today by the gear-repair session and left uncommitted, which
for this particular file is the one failure mode that matters: performance_notes
IS the archive, so an uncommitted entry is not a note, it is a memory.

Two signals, both about the rig rather than the audio:

- *"ok just played rose_rouge works great!"* — first confirmation that the
  CLASSIC LCXL (mk1, 1235:0061) is a fully viable performing surface once
  lcxl-leds-watch owns the paint. Worth recording precisely because the rig had
  drifted into treating the mk3 as the only real board; the classic is a
  fallback, not a downgrade.
- *"and the midi mon is beautiful!"* — on first sight of tools/bridge/midiviz.py.
  A taste signal about the rig's own UI, and the follow-up ask (always-open,
  always-on-top, every desktop) says it plainly: midiviz is an instrument of
  the rig, not a debug tool.

CLAUDE.md asks for every reaction captured durably because this corpus feeds
sampling, effect choices and the auto-mastering heuristics. Durably means
committed.

Four kinds of orphan, all real source, none of it generated:

- tools/sweep_state.py — 'the surface needs a sweep', as a fact the rig can
  act on. Companion to the LCXL3 driver thread.
- armada/tide-table/kick_bass.py — the deterministic kick-vs-bass tiebreaker,
  the one split CLAP cannot do reliably because both live low. Exactly the
  'validate by analysis, never infer role from the name' rule in code.
- armada/tide-table/calibration.stem.json — joins calibration.json and
  calibration.whole-mix.json, which were already tracked. A calibration set
  missing one of its three members is a trap for whoever reads the other two.
- install_superdirt.sclang — pins SuperDirt v1.7.2 and recompiles. The boot
  path is exactly where 'simple, non-brittle, one entrypoint' matters.
- live/collab/benoit/tous_ensemble.tidal and live/midi/nova/nujazz/
  nouvelle_couleur.tidal — two scores. nouvelle_couleur carries a '-- url:'
  header naming its backdrop source, per the scene standard.
- visuals/{maze,nightly_repairs,there,there0}.js — four hydra sketches.

Python entrypoints staged 100755 via --chmod, not left to the working tree.

    the drawer is empty now.
    everything in it was something,
    which is why it took three weeks to look.

Ten shell tools plus FORMAT.md and MIX.md, written 2026-07-29 and untracked
since: stem-stats, energy-profile, onset-detect, silence-detect,
transition-detect, mix-meta, mix-render, mix-normalize, mix-master, lufs-check,
and lib/progress.sh. FORMAT.md defines a <project>.mix.json metadata contract
whose tools 'read existing metadata and augment (don't overwrite unless told)'.

Committed with the exec bit set IN THE INDEX, which is the part that bites:
3fdf5b97 had to restore it on 63 scripts, and MIX.md invokes every one of these
as ./stem-stats. A file that is executable in the working tree and 100644 in
git is executable exactly until someone else clones it. Note also that
'git commit -- path' silently drops a staged mode flip (the trap 1667bb02
documented), so this went in without a pathspec after proving nothing else
was staged.

mix/take94's 833 MB stayed out (a5a5b37). The scripts are the artifact; the
take is the input.

⚠️ Flagged, not resolved: this overlaps ../tidal-ears' mastering CLI, which is
the canonical recipe per MASTERING.md. Two toolboxes that both master a set is
the shape feedback_one_parser_per_concept warns about. I am not merging them
blind — committing first so the overlap is visible in one tree instead of
half-invisible in an untracked directory. PLN's call which one is the spine.

    ten small knives in a drawer nobody opened,
    sharp the whole time.

Written 2026-08-14, uncommitted for three weeks: the -inf fader forensics on
Tidal Live.ardour, the corpus triage that found '51 broken tracks are actually
22 — the harness was the biggest bug', and the 192 kHz master-format audit
('probe, never assume'). All three are marked shareable: true, which is the
whole point — these logs are the source material for the posts and videos,
and they were sitting one bad rm away from not existing.

The rule in armada/tasks/README.md is 'write the entry when the task lands,
while it's fresh'. It worked: the writing happened same-day. It was the
committing that didn't, because git status had become unreadable (see a5a5b37).
Documentation discipline is not one habit, it is two, and the second one is
the one that survives a hard drive.

Left for PLN, one line: all three carry 'log: 025' in their frontmatter, which
025-fifteen-intros-are-not-a-set.md already owns. They also use dated filenames
like 2026-08-03-j5-audio-dropout.md rather than the README's NNN-slug.md.
Renumbering is a call about his own archive's spine, not mine — and the dates
are 2026-08-14, which lands them BEFORE 039, so the next free numbers would
read out of order.

    the log was kept. the log was not carried.
    a ship's record that never leaves the desk
    is a memory, not a record.

Three weeks of untracked working tree, and the reason nothing was committed is
that 'untracked' had stopped meaning anything: 957 MB of take audio and scene
mp4s sat in the same status output as three finished captain's logs, so the
whole list read as noise and got skipped as one.

Sorted by what each thing actually is, against the precedent already in this
file and in the index: mix/'s ten scripts are source and go in, mix/take94's
833 MB does not. The .js scene sketches are source, the 124 MB of rendered
mp4 is not. calibration.json and calibration.whole-mix.json are tracked, so
calibration.stem.json belongs with them; bounds_*.json is generated output
whose builder is already tracked, so it does not.

No new policy here — just applying the one written at the top of this file to
a pile that had grown too mixed to read.

    the tide went out three weeks ago
    and left everything on the sand together:
    charts, driftwood, a gigabyte of water.
    sorting is not cleaning. sorting is deciding what was ever yours.

PLN opened the day hearing it: 'our private cuts of OPAL are badly cut
begin/end unaligned'. The board had one theory (a 24s truncation) and it was
wrong. This lens found the real shape: the ENTIRE Aug-12 first cut is still
on SoundCloud — all 15 tracks — living beside the 6 correct v4 ones under a
litter of ad-hoc permalinks (/opal26-wap, /12-mafia-12, /ceci-nest-pas-une-
bombe), and eight of the stale ones are the ones wearing artwork. So the
wrong cut is the one that looks finished. Of course he heard it.

Duration is the discriminator, and it is far sharper than assumed: measured
on this account, SoundCloud's full_duration reproduces the source to the
millisecond (477.600 uploaded, 477.600 reported). Tolerance is 50ms, not the
seconds you would allow for a transcode — a loose tolerance here buys no
safety, it only invents ambiguity between cuts that differ plainly.

Three things I got wrong first, each left in as a guard:
  - filenames are not authoritative. 'Perfect <3' uploads to /perfect-3, so a
    filename-derived slug reported two live tracks as NOT UPLOADED. Titles
    come from the plan now, which is what the uploader actually used.
  - streaming and club masters share every duration, so offering both as
    rival candidates marked all 14 AMBIGUOUS. Identical generations collapse.
  - a duration collision is not provenance. /au-revoir-lord-toyota (2020) and
    /saria-demo (2025) both matched OPAL to 50ms. Anything uploaded before
    the oldest render on disk cannot be a cut of it, and a coincidence must
    never reach a delete manifest — so the date floor is a hard gate and the
    discards are printed, not silently dropped.

The second pass is the one that earned its keep. Roll call only looks where
it expects a track to be, so it can never see a stale cut hiding under a
different slug. Strays scans the whole account. Absence needs proof.

    fifteen ghosts of a set played once,
    each wearing the cover art of the real thing --
    the lens does not listen, it only counts seconds,
    and seconds were enough.

catalog.generated.json was stale since 2026-06-23 (73 tracks / 23 gigs) and
missing opal-festival-2026 + cosmicfest-2026 entirely — it never got rebuilt
after catalog_view.json picked those gigs up on 2026-09-02. Re-ran the
pipeline (build_catalog_view.py then build_catalog.py):

  catalog_view.json:      81 tracks / 25 gigs / 63 takes (unchanged — was
                           already current, only as_of + minor EDA-coverage
                           deltas moved)
  catalog.generated.json: 73→81 tracks, 23→25 gigs, now carries both missing
                           2026 gigs, both validate clean against models.Catalog,
                           and track-id sets match view↔generated exactly
                           (no silent drops either direction)

Root cause of the as_of staleness: build_catalog_view.py hardcoded
`AS_OF = "2026-06-06"` as a literal instead of stamping the actual build
date, so every regeneration since kept reporting the same frozen date no
matter when it ran. Now computed as `date.today().isoformat()`. Checked the
other suspected bug (a next/content/lives hardcoded path) — not present;
LIVES already points at .../www/content/lives without next/ since 6e51fff.

PLN opened the session hearing badly-cut begin/end on the private OPAL
uploads. Measured all three render generations against what the board
recorded on the account: /take-five-drops sits at 6:57 = 417 s, which is
exactly the Aug-12 first cut — four days and two boundary revisions before
the ear-verified v4. The complaint had a mechanical cause.

Ruled out before believing anything: tracks_v4_streaming matches
segments_v4.json to the millisecond on all 14 (CRIME's 2s rest and
REVOLUTION's reverb tail included), the upload plan's titles/files/durations
are aligned and exact, and the ear file's 19:33 mtime is the signoff record
being written, not a later boundary edit. Nothing needs re-cutting; the
approved audio is already on disk. This is a re-upload problem.

Two things stand in the way and one of them is PLN's call: SCW.delete() is
hard-gated to the test namespace so we cannot remove our own stale uploads,
and SoundCloud skips rather than replaces an existing permalink. Also: no
sc_state.json was ever written, so the account is the only record of what
landed — sc pull --artwork recovers ids, permalinks, durations AND the covers
PLN asked to save, read-only, in one pass.

Plus the catalog answer he asked for (generated.json is 2 gigs stale behind
the view, 14 gigs uncatalogued), www's OPAL tracks.json still on segments_v3
where Slopmotion reads it, the CLAUDE.md next/ path that no longer exists,
and two stale-opens git says already shipped.

veridis_quo (PLN, first jam): hats ply gate moved to ^43 (E3, its own column),
bass line up an octave. rose_rouge: comments from the night it re-validated the
rebuilt rig — a sample-kit idea and the bassline's new name.

The footer froze at '?REC 00:10' on the glass during the first real take. No
code-level freeze reproduced; what WAS wrong: the ghost mirror recomputed state
instead of mirroring device writes (so diagnosis lied), and the 2s tick wrote
unconditionally with no dedup. Now: _home_cache records the string actually
sent, the tick writes only on change (repaint ≤2s, revert ≤2s after stale), and
the 20s label-reassert forces a full repaint so dedup can never mask a device-
side reset. Hardware verdict awaits the next recorded take.

Bug 1: Ardour flushes stems in ~12MB bursts every ~3s — a 2s stop-grace read
every gap as stop/start and reset the clock eleven times in one 20s take.
Grace is now 6s, with the measured cadence in the comment.
Bug 2: transport-button feedback IS bit-gated — /set_surface feedback 8→9
(button-status + heartbeat); the 'not bit-gated' reading died on the live rig.
Bug 3: a mute lens is not a dissenting lens — combine_rec only counts OSC when
arm AND roll are concrete, so 'connected but silent' can no longer stamp
conflict:true on ground truth. src labeling now names actual contributors.
Regression tests drive RecPass through the real flush cadence; 169 green.

Third line of the home screen: 'ParVagues' at rest; 'REC mm:ss' while the
gig-log k:'rec' stream says audio is landing on disk (tail-read of the newest
gig jsonl, same style as last_eval); '?REC' when the files and OSC lenses
disagree — a timer the performer must not trust blindly is marked, not hidden.
Stale or absent signal degrades to the plain footer, never crashes a redraw.
Pure decision function rec_line() + tests.

A GUI-launched Ardour has a BARE argv (only gig-up passes the session as an
argument), so argv-matching alone left the files lens blind on the real rig.
Resolution now climbs: argv → /proc/<pid>/cwd holding a *.ardour → open-fd
symlink targets (most-fds wins on ambiguity, logged once). Injectable proc_root
makes each rung testable against a fake /proc; 9 new tests reproduce the exact
live gap (163 green). check-mix.py shares the latent argv-only bug — flagged in
the sync comment, not fixed this pass.

'Recording X had track Y playing at time Z' becomes answerable. Files lens =
ground truth (stems growing in interchange/, stat-only, 2s grace, RecPass state
machine); OSC lens = Ardour's own word (/set_surface feedback=8 handshake to
:3819, listens :3820, /rec_enable_toggle + transport — the manual's real name
for master arm, not /rec_enabled). Records on transitions + every tick while
recording; lens disagreement ships as conflict:true, never smoothed over.
44 new tests (155 total green), stdlib-only, --no-rec escape hatch.

The straggler from 3fdf5b97's sweep: with core.fileMode=false a PATHSPEC commit
reads modes from the working tree (where they're invisible) and skips a staged
mode-only flip — index-only commits are how mode fixes land here.

lcxl-leds-watch (manual policy) leaves the target; lcxl3-driver and perf-tray
join it. Generated by rig_units.py --target — the ~/.config copy is a symlink
into the repo, so the regen IS this diff.

perf-tray + gig-up: default-on 'Cut GPU at gig launch' (kill TuParles, verify dGPU RTD3, name holders if it won't sleep)

The OLED's track clock resets 'a new track is a new lap' — but skipped the
FIRST load, so lap 1 inherited the constructor's zero. Invisible while the
driver restarted with every session; under the persistent unit (log 039) it
counted the idle hours before the first load: 24:27 on a fresh rose_rouge.

The night's lesson, converged: the driver only ran when a session remembered to
start it, then the session's background task got OOM-reaped and the surface sat
untranslated with every check green.

- tools/lcxl3-driver.service: repo-owned unit like its siblings; retry-forever
  hotplug posture; Conflicts=lcxl-leds-watch so exactly one painter owns the
  board; follow-mode (no --track) so paint tracks the loaded file.
- rig_units.py: lcxl3-driver + perf-tray rows (THE list is complete again),
  new 'manual' boot policy so --ensure can never start the v2 painter into a
  Conflicts= kill; --list --boot filter for shell consumers.
- parvagues-gear: moved into the repo; derives its sets from rig_units --list
  instead of being the fourth hardcoded copy; autostart-on now defers to
  --ensure (it used to enable parvagues-sc at login against policy).
- gig-up.sh leds(): detects the plugged surface generation and hands the LCXL3
  to the driver unit; v2 path invoked via python3 (exec-bit-proof).

core.fileMode=false means chmod fixes your tree and nothing else — the 203/EXEC
class (log 032) recurs on every fresh checkout because the index said 644.
git update-index --chmod=+x is the repo-level fix; every shebang'd script under
tools/ + gig-up.sh + perf.sh now ships executable.

The rig is heavily instrumented and nothing ever looked. gig-log has been
sampling freq, per-core cpu, throttle deltas, fan rpm, per-process cpu/RSS and
xruns at 1 Hz for weeks (512k samples in the current file), yet every failure
this session was discovered by feel, mid-session, at the worst moment. This is
the looking.

Every check exists because it silently cost a real session on 2026-09-04/05:

  * Composed an hour at 800 MHz because the Bridge's perf-watch reasserted
    `silent` every 30 s, undoing each fix within half a minute. Cost 2671
    xruns/hour. Every throttle counter read zero — with HWP, epp=power makes the
    CPU *choose* its floor, so the failure has no error message.
      -> check_perf, check_regime_agreement
  * `gluck` refused to load for 90 minutes. The symlink was perfect; sclang had
    been up 6 days and loadSoundFiles scans folder NAMES once, at startup, so a
    bank added later is invisible. Pulsar's "restart SuperDirt" button is a no-op
    here (SuperDirt is a systemd service, not Pulsar's child) and honestly
    reported 142 h uptime while looking fine.
      -> check_superdirt_fresh
  * Samples/crutch was a symlink pointing at ITSELF since Oct 2025. Dead bank,
    no complaint from anything.
      -> check_sample_integrity
  * A new LCXL3 showed default LEDs because the resolver name-matches the mk2
    product string, while the watcher logged "-> 27 controls" and looked healthy.
      -> check_midi_surface

Three design rules, all learned the hard way:

  1. Green is not evidence. `active`, exit 0 and silence all lied during this
     session, so every check reads the LIVE value from sysfs/procfs/the device
     and prints the number it saw. No check trusts a status.
  2. Every FAIL carries its fix as a runnable command. A preflight that reports
     a problem without the remedy just adds a step between you and playing.
  3. It never mutates the rig. Read-only by construction — a preflight that
     writes is one more un-arbitrated writer, the exact bug class it detects.

16 checks. First run found 1 fail + 3 warns, including a genuine xrun rate of
2224/hour with every CPU line green — a problem we had not noticed and which the
clock fix does not explain.

Known over-sensitivity: check_xruns uses the raw total, and two of the top three
sources (input.hydra_in, the built-in Speaker sink) may not be in the live
monitoring path at all. Xruns on an idle sink inflate the count without being
audible; it should weight by nodes actually in the path.

  gig-preflight.py            human report, exit 1 on any FAIL
  gig-preflight.py --quiet    only WARN/FAIL, for gig-up.sh
  gig-preflight.py --json     for the tray/Bridge

A new Launch Control XL 3 sat there showing factory-default LEDs. Not autostart
(lcxl-leds-watch was active), not wiring (aconnect showed the surface connected
to Midi Through): the port resolver matches the product name "Launch Control XL",
and the mk3 enumerates as "LCXL3 1". So _find_hw_port()/_find_seq_port() both
returned None and every frame went into the void — while the parse stage kept
logging "-> 27 controls" and looking perfectly healthy. A failure with no error
message, which is the worst kind and the whole reason gig-preflight now exists.

NAME_RE also matches \blcxl\d*\b. The inline HUI exclusion becomes SKIP_PORT_RE,
which additionally drops the mk3's DAW and "To DIN" ports — the mk2 exposed one
non-LED port, the mk3 exposes three, and sending a frame to any of them is a
silent no-op.

Validated: resolver now returns hw:1,0,0 and seq 20:0; it returned None before.

NOT fixed here — the LED dialect. The device answered a Universal Device Inquiry
with:

  F0 7E 00 06 02  00 20 29  48 01  00 00  01 01 0B 39  F7
                  Novation  family        firmware 1.1.11

and per Novation's programmer's reference the mk3 lights controls in RGB, one
message per control:

  F0 00 20 29 02 15 01 53 <control index> <R> <G> <B> F7

versus this file's mk2 frame: device id 0x11, command 0x78, a User-1 template,
batched (index, value) pairs, and a bicolor 2-bit red x 2-bit green = 16-state
colour model. So mk3 support is a second dialect plus a replacement colour model
(RGB doesn't map onto 16 bicolor states), and the per-control message form means
a full 40-control repaint costs 40 SysEx messages where the mk2 cost one — the
paint loop will need rate limiting. Tracked in SRE TODO.d.

perf-audio deprioritized Pulsar to nice 10 in cool/extreme and nice 5 in
standard, on the theory that the editor should yield to audio. That trade buys
nothing. The entire audio chain runs SCHED_FIFO *above* it — scsynth 90,
sclang 85, PipeWire 95, WirePlumber 95, Ardour 80 — and a realtime policy
preempts every CFS nice level unconditionally. So Pulsar at -5 cannot take a
single cycle from SuperDirt; it only wins against ordinary processes (browsers,
indexers, builds), which is exactly what we want during a composing session.

Now nice -5 in every mode, overridable with PULSAR_NICE=NN (0 = neutral,
positive = the old behaviour). -5 rather than 0 because the renderer is a single
JS thread and its work is bursty: it has to win the CPU on the tick after a
keystroke, then yield. No root needed — @audio's `nice -19` grant in
/etc/security/limits.conf is what makes the same renice work for pln.

Validated: installed to /usr/local/sbin/perf-audio, re-applied via
`bridge.py perf standard`, all Pulsar processes confirmed at nice -5 live.

Reconnu depuis le strudel 'Vardis Quo' de MariaAreadne: Veridis Quo
(Discovery, 2001). Mélodie d'orgue transcrite en cat 16 cycles,
progression Dm-G-Am-F ralentie x2, arpèges FMRhodes, basse Warsaw,
breaks165/jungle_breaks en stack d8. 116 BPM.

Two commits, 4 files, reviewed as a diff against master.

  tempo_timeline.py       tempo per window in a rendered track, to test whether
                          a planned track was actually played. Answered WAP: not
                          played (median 124.5 over segment 1, nothing at 133
                          above the confidence floor), calibrated first on a
                          declared-160 track which returned 161.5.
  gigmeta sidecar         PLN's confirmed set time (~20:30), his verbatim
                          approval of "Le Jardin", and the WAP question moved
                          from open to resolved with both sources named.
  build_gig_tracksjson    resolve the frontmatter-only fields before writing
                          _provenance, so their origin is recorded whether or
                          not --md-out was passed.
  TASKS_DUMP.md           the board after the release session: six resume
                          points, two of which are the kind that look done when
                          they are not.

Two bugs of mine are in the branch rather than tidied out of it: the octave fold
was an infinite loop for any value a sub-octave band cannot represent, and the
per-frame FFT loop was ~100k Python-level calls for a five-minute stem.

The two-set release board from 2026-09-01 is half discharged. CosmicFest-26 went
from "finished on disk with nowhere to go" to a private 15-item release behind a
canonical www gig page; OPAL-26's remaining upload work is now the only release
thread left, and it is unblocked rather than in flight.

Six resume points, each with the exact command and the wanted output, because
two of them are the kind that look done when they are not: the uploader saying
"N uploaded" is not evidence that N tracks exist (two were accepted, verified,
and then vanished), and renaming the mix's permalink without regenerating the
plan would make the next run re-upload 693 MB rather than skip it.

Also recorded: the www branch is committed but unpushed because that repo is on
github and no key was loaded, the CosmicFest plan still carries `_UNSIGNED` so
nothing may be flipped public, and the two levers left on the record are the LOW
end (the real harmony lever, much bigger than the air shelf) and the deferred
club variant. Plus a note that piment_bresilien.tidal is PLN's own edit.

PLN's set plan lists WAP [133] second at CosmicFest and the recording has no WAP
in it. He remembered dropping it — "didnt play WAP i think in the end [...]
direct from Bombe DJ to Something about Drums, its what i chose that day" — and
asked me to check rather than take his word, which is the right instinct: the
rival explanation is that WAP IS in the recording, inside segment 1, and the
boundary pass read two tracks as one. Duration cannot separate those (track 1 is
6.8 min, an ordinary length here for one track and also for two short ones).

Tempo can, because the two candidates differ: Bombe DJ is 124 and WAP is 133,
which is 0.484 s against 0.451 s per beat — 7% apart, well inside what an
inter-onset histogram resolves. So this walks a rendered track in windows and
reports what tempo each window is actually playing, on the demucs DRUMS stem
rather than the master, because the question is about kick timing and a stem is
far cleaner to find onsets in than a stage-mic mix.

Method deliberately copied from tools/tempo-lens.py, which measures a live orbit
and cannot read a file: spectral-flux onsets, then the MODE of the inter-onset
intervals — never the mean, which over a pattern with ghost notes lands between
two real values and reports a tempo nothing is playing.

Calibrated before it was trusted, on There's Something About Drums (declared
160): median 161.5. Then the answer, on segment 1 with --expect 124 --alt 133:
median 124.5 over 26 windows with a steady pulse, and NO window at 133 above the
steadiness floor. One 20 s window reads 132.5 at confidence 0.11, below the
floor and with no neighbour agreeing — WAP as a played track would occupy twelve
to twenty-four consecutive windows, not one. So: not played. PLN's memory and
the audio agree, and the boundary pass did not miss a track.

Two bugs of my own on the way here, both worth the record:

  * the octave fold was an INFINITE LOOP. Folding into a band of [100, 180) by
    doubling-and-halving never terminates for a value like 99: 99 -> 198 (out
    the top) -> 99 -> 198, because no power of two lands it inside a band
    narrower than an octave. Two processes sat at 98% CPU while I assumed the
    machine was merely busy with the upload. The fold is now closed-form
    (`bpm * 2**-floor(log2(bpm/lo))`) into [X, 2X), and the CLI takes
    --octave-from because an octave is the only honest width: tempo from audio
    is determined up to a factor of two and no further.
  * the per-frame FFT loop was ~100k Python-level calls for a five-minute stem.
    One strided view and one batched rfft instead.

Also, since the meta sidecar is where facts live: PLN's confirmed set time
(~20:30), his verbatim approval of "Le Jardin", and the WAP question moved from
open to resolved with both sources named. And build_gig_tracksjson now resolves
the frontmatter-only fields (time, location, CTA, tags) BEFORE writing
`_provenance`, so their origin is recorded in tracks.json whether or not
--md-out was passed. tracks.json is the file that outlives the invocation.

Side finding for PLN's ears, reported rather than acted on: over the last ~80 s
of segment 1 the drums stem reads 161.5 BPM — the tempo of the NEXT track. Two
readings, and I cannot choose between them from here. Either the segue is a long
livecoded blend with Something About Drums layered in early (which is what
"direct" looks like in TidalCycles), or the boundary at 6:46.6 sits later than
the music does. His ear owns that one.

PLN asked three questions this morning and each one landed on a different
failure of mine, so the log gets a part III rather than a tidy epilogue.

The demucs OOM he spotted was a fossil: the killed first attempt (8.2 GB, 2 of
14 sections) sits in the journal forever beside the rerun that succeeded at
7.6 GB. A unit's history is not its state — verify the artefacts.

The +5-vs-+8 recommendation is corrected. I had called +8 "the conservative end"
against a generic genre norm; against OPAL v4, the master he actually signed off,
CosmicFest is already 6.6-8.1x brighter above 4 kHz on a third of the sub. So
+5, and the lesson is about naming the reference: a genre norm and the artist's
own shelf can point opposite ways, and only one of them answers "does it sit with
my other release". Recorded with the caveat that most of that table is the
recording, not the master — and that the unspent lever for harmony is the LOW end,
not the shelf we A/B'd all night.

And the gig metadata was never missing. His own repo held the date, the location,
the stage and the lineup; his backlog held the five movements. The blocker was
that I had not looked, and in that gap I had written an unsourced 2026-08-23 into
the spec. Wrong by a day, with the answer two files away.

Plus the three things that only running the pipeline could show: POST /tracks is
dead AND burns the S3 upload first, --force never worked for the case it was
named after, and the catalog gap was a cycle rather than a stale cache.