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.

PLN: "lets merge on main all these tooling improvements and go on".

17 commits, 16 files, all reviewed as a diff against master before merging and
not just at the tip — the lesson from the 200-file merge in ea52a32c..2f947c2c.
Twelve are new files, four are edits: build_release_plan.py, catalog_view.json
(a regeneration, 73 -> 81 tracks, dropping none), the CosmicFest spec, and
TASKS_DUMP.md.

What it adds, in one line each:

  master_stemless.py     a bus-only master for a gig with no stems
  demucs_sections.py     separation in bounded chunks, sections and global
  eda_stems.py           the required stem EDA, from separations instead
  setlist_to_segments.py an ear-called setlist becomes segments
  compare_masters.py     an A/B in numbers, so the ear spends itself on taste
  build_gig_tracksjson.py  a gig page generated from sourced facts
  check_permalinks.py    the shelf is one namespace; refuse a collision
  finish_cosmic.sh       everything downstream of the masters, unattended

Delivered: two masters in spec (-14.0 LUFS, -0.9 dBTP, 44.1/24, duration exact
to a microsecond against the source), a 14-track split that verifies clean, 14
section stem sets plus a global pass, and three EDA questions answered — the
missing air is cymbals, the kick is present 44.8% of the set against OPAL's
59%, and the global separation pass is a measured waste of time (corr
0.943-0.977, level deltas under a quarter of a dB).

Four things I got wrong are recorded in the branch rather than tidied out of it,
because three shared one shape worth naming: a check whose failure looks exactly
like success. A dropped rtk grep plus a block-buffered log made a live render
look dead, and two processes wrote the same paths for forty minutes. A speed
claim counted section directories, which appear when a writer OPENS. An edit
no-op'd while printing that it had worked. The fourth was not new — the first
full render came out at 192 kHz, a loudnorm trap this project had already
documented and I did not read before writing a new chain.

Not merged and still PLN's: the +5 vs +8 air-shelf call, and a release_signoff.
The CosmicSet upload on the shelf right now is PRIVATE and its plan says
_UNSIGNED.

Caught before --go, on the last check I nearly skipped. The CosmicSet plan
resolved four of its fifteen permalinks onto tracks Opal had already uploaded:
/you-my-sunshine, /take-five-drops, /piment-bresilien, /eh-ouais-je-funk. Of
course it did — those are the same scores, played at both gigs a fortnight
apart, and a permalink is derived from the title.

What makes this worth a gate rather than a fix is the failure mode. SoundCloud
is idempotent by permalink and the uploader treats a taken permalink as "already
done" — correct for resuming an interrupted 1.4 GB run, catastrophic for a
different recording of the same track. So the upload would NOT have errored. It
would have reported success with four tracks missing from the release, or, with
--overwrite, replaced Opal's audio with CosmicFest's. Neither is visible from
the terminal that ran it. `feedback_absence_needs_proof`: a release that is
quietly short looks exactly like a release that is complete.

check_permalinks.py resolves a plan against the live account and sorts every
permalink into FREE / already-up-as-this-same-audio / COLLISION, using duration
as the discriminator because it is the one property that survives SoundCloud's
transcode and is already in the plan. A collision exits 1. Verified both ways:
it fails the un-suffixed plan naming all four real collisions, and passes the
suffixed one 15/15 free. Its shelf query carries access=playable,preview,blocked
because scform.py's own notes record that private tracks are omitted without it
— and an audition release is private by definition, so the gate would have
called every permalink free.

build_release_plan.py gains --permalink-suffix to fix the cause, so a gig's
permalinks are scoped to the gig and no future pair of sets can collide.

Two things about --force, which this release is the first to actually need (the
signoff cannot precede the upload when SoundCloud is where PLN listens):

  * it never worked. The no-signoff branch did `return problems` before reaching
    the override, so the flag documented as "emit even without a valid ear
    signoff" could only override a STALE signoff, never a missing one. The early
    return is gone and both problems now reach the same override.
  * it now demands --why, and records the reason, the timestamp and a
    do-not-flip-public warning in the plan's own `_UNSIGNED` block. A terminal
    warning scrolls away; the JSON is what the uploader reads. An override with
    no stated reason is indistinguishable from an approved release two weeks
    later, and the gate exists precisely so nobody has to remember.

Left alone deliberately: the plan cannot tell private from public — the uploader's
--sharing flag decides that — so _UNSIGNED documents rather than enforces.

The CosmicSet release was finished on disk and could not move, because every
upload adapter goes through build_release_plan.py and that refuses to run
without a canonical www gig page. Writing the page by hand was never an option —
`feedback_metadata_vs_mastering` exists because a previous release copied a wrong
ALBUM string out of an intermediate script. So the generator learned to take
supplied facts instead.

--meta takes a JSON sidecar where every field is {value, source, locator, date}.
The builder reads the values, carries the provenance into `_provenance` in the
output, and prints "nothing left to invent" ONLY when no non-derivable field is
still empty. A bare value is accepted — PLN often just says a thing in chat —
but it is recorded as unsourced, so the gap stays visible instead of becoming
indistinguishable from a researched fact.

Which mattered immediately, because ONE OF MY OWN STRINGS WAS WRONG. The gig
spec said 2026-08-23. I had written that with no source. This machine held the
answer in two places all along: www/PRODUCT.md:21 says "cosmicfest_v2.67Hz
(20-23 August 2026, jour J Saturday 22)", and the invite's own lineup section is
headed "le 22 août, dans le jardin". PLN confirmed: "yea it was samedi 22
indeed". The spec is corrected and now says where the date comes from. That is
the second unsourced string of mine to survive into a spec, hence a sidecar with
a locator column rather than one more hand-filled field.

The set's five movements are not invented either: Ouverture / SUNSET / We call it
NuJazz / NUIT / FINALE come from PLN's own plan in backlog.md, which
`reference_gig_tracklist_sources` names as canonical. The sidecar records the one
discrepancy rather than smoothing it: the plan plays WAP second and the recording
has no WAP, so every section from track 2 on shifts up by one. Track 1 is 6.8
min, in line with other single tracks (3 is 6.6, 7 is 6.3), so it does not look
like two merged — but that is an inference and it is labelled as one.

Sample coverage went 7 empty lists -> 0, and the cause was not staleness. The
first two tracks I chased (Rose Rouge, LiveCode Parade) were absent from
catalog_view even after a rebuild, because catalog_view's track universe comes
from `load_gigs()` globbing the ALREADY-PUBLISHED content/lives/**/tracks.json.
A track's first gig page can therefore never find itself in the view: the file
that would add it is the one being written. That is a cycle, not a stale cache,
and rebuilding forever would not have fixed it. The builder now falls back to the
same `tidal_score.orbit_sounds` the view itself calls — one parser, reused, so a
new track's sample list cannot disagree with a catalogued one. With the page in
place the cycle closes: the rebuilt view goes 73 -> 81 tracks, dropping none, and
both tracks are catalogued.

Also: "collab" joins STYLE_DIRS, because OPAL already published it that way for
every live/collab/* score. style_of takes the last matching path part, so
live/collab/nova/techno/x still reads techno.

A threshold of 3700 seconds against an expected 3779 accepted exactly the state
the pass sits in for minutes: it writes in 120 s chunks, so 31 chunks is 3720 s —
one short — and "basically done" sails through a loose comparison. My own monitor
fired a premature COMPLETE on that very number, which is how I noticed: the check
and the bug had the same blind spot because I wrote both.

It now reads the expected duration from the master itself and allows two seconds,
so the check cannot drift from the thing it checks.

The fallback message says what a short global file would actually cost, which is
the part worth naming: it does not FAIL the comparison, because compare_global
takes min(len(a), len(b)). It compares fewer seconds per track and reports thinner
evidence under identical column headings. Silent degradation in a summary nobody
watches being written is worse than an error.

Second attempt at this commit. The first edit silently no-op'd — a scripted
replacement whose search string carried escaped line-continuations that did not
match the file, while the script printed "gate tightened" unconditionally, and I
reported success on the strength of that print. Caught by grepping the file. This
version asserts the anchor exists before replacing and asserts the content changed
after, then proves it by grep rather than by message. That is the third instance
tonight of the same failure shape — a check whose failure mode is indistinguishable
from success — so the assertions are the actual fix, not the gate.

Held until now deliberately: finish_cosmic.sh was mid-execution, and bash reads
scripts incrementally, so editing a running script can corrupt the run.

Everything landed. Two full masters differing only in air shelf, both at -14.0 LUFS
/ -0.9 dBTP / LRA 7.5-7.6 / 44100 Hz 24-bit, and 14 split tracks verifying ALL OK.
Duration is 3779.317551 s against a source of 3779.317550 — the load-bearing number,
because it means every one of PLN's playhead calls stays valid and the split lands
exactly where he put the cuts rather than approximately there.

Q1: the missing air is CYMBALS. Drums hold 0.367% of their own energy above 8 kHz
against 0.084% for the runner-up, a 4.4x concentration where evenly-spread energy
would have meant codec hiss. So opening the shelf is licensed by measurement, and
how far is not — hence an A/B rather than a number I liked. The framing that
matters: both candidates are still BELOW typical brightness for electronic masters
(8-16 kHz at 0.40% and 0.63% against a 1-3% norm), so the choice is "quite dark vs
slightly less dark", not "safe vs aggressive". The A/B is also confound-free:
identical loudness, identical true peak, range within 0.1 LU, only the tilt differs.

Q2: the floor is worse here than OPAL. Kick active time averages 44.8% against the
59% project_floor_problem measured for OPAL-26 from real orbit stems, worst at
#2 22.8%, #3 33.4%, #8 36.9%. A stage mic in a room explains it on its own, so this
is a lead rather than a verdict — but it is the first time this gig's floor has been
measurable at all.

Q3, PLN's own question, and the answer is a clean negative: the global pass was not
worth running. Correlations 0.943-0.977 against the per-section stems with level
deltas of at most 0.21 dB. The two separations are the same stems. The prediction
held exactly — htdemucs' 7.8 s receptive field means a global pass cannot give the
model more musical context, so only normalisation differs, and it barely moved. It
cost ~2.5 h of CPU competing with the master render to establish a quarter of a dB.
Sections only next time; the question was worth asking once, not twice.

Side finding: bass is the least stably separated of the four sources (0.9432,
lowest), consistent with the same run putting PunkAChien's bass into `other` — bass
stem at -81.0 dBFS while `other` was the loudest stem in the set.

The log also records three self-inflicted errors that share one shape: checks whose
failure mode was indistinguishable from success. A dropped rtk grep plus a
block-buffered logfile that made a working job look dead, so two renders raced on
the same paths for forty minutes. A speed claim built on counting directories that
appear when writers open. And a scripted edit that silently no-op'd while printing
success unconditionally. Plus the 192 kHz master, which was not a new bug at all —
topic_postprod_mastering has carried that trap since tidal-ears hit it, and I wrote
a new mastering chain without re-reading the omnibus that exists to prevent it.

PLN has to choose between two masters that differ only in a high-shelf setting.
The ear is the authority on which one is better and this does not try to replace
it — but "which do you prefer" is a much easier question when you also know WHAT
differs and by how much, because a shelf change does not stay in the band it
names. It moves true peak, it changes how hard the limiter works, and it shifts
where the loudness normaliser lands.

So: integrated loudness, true peak, loudness range, L/R correlation and the
band-energy distribution for each file, then a delta table against the first,
because two absolute tables side by side is exactly how you miss a change that
matters. Band deltas are reported as RATIOS rather than differences in
percentage points: a band going from 0.12% to 0.24% is a doubling, and "+0.12
points" hides that entirely.

Measured on the RENDERED files, never predicted from the filter settings. A shelf
set to +3 dB does not necessarily put +3 dB in the master, since the limiter
downstream has opinions — feedback_verify_own_renders, the machine's job is the
objective facts so PLN's ears are spent on taste.

The smoke test proved the point immediately. Comparing the trial streaming master
against the harder-pushed club one, the loud version shows 0.92x the 60-120 Hz
energy and 1.08x the 300-1000 Hz: that is the limiter eating bass transients and
relatively lifting the mids, at a cost of 1.4 LU of range for 3.5 dB of loudness.
A measurable signature of what loudness costs, rather than a vague sense that the
loud one sounds smaller.

Wired into the finisher, so the summary PLN reads over coffee has the two masters
with their differences quantified next to the files themselves.

The spec still listed a -9 LUFS club variant that the master unit no longer
renders, so render_release would have printed MISSING into the summary PLN reads
over coffee — an error that looks like a broken pipeline but is actually a
decision nobody wrote down. So it is written down now.

`club` moves to `variants_deferred`, carrying the reasoning rather than just the
path. It is not a failure on two counts. First, the axes were conflated: PLN's
"one live club mix" means the CONTINUOUS set as opposed to the album split, which
is a FORM, while this entry is a LOUDNESS target of our own convention. No
CosmicFest track is cut, so the continuous mix simply IS the master file, and both
of his forms are already covered by the streaming master plus tracks_v1_streaming/.
Second, it would have missed anyway: reaching -9 from a -25.6 LUFS source with
4.7 dB of linear headroom tripped the LRA floor at -10.5 on the trial, meaning the
target costs more dynamics than it is worth on this particular tape. Moving the key
back into `variants` renders it, so the decision is reversible in one edit.

Added `abVariants` alongside, recording what the freed CPU bought and why: the stem
EDA proved the 8-16 kHz deficit is cymbals rather than codec noise — drums hold
0.367% of their own energy above 8 kHz against 0.084% for the runner-up, a 4.4x
concentration — which licenses opening the air shelf but says nothing about how
far. Two full masters at +5 and +8, identical otherwise, judged in place rather
than on a clip, per the lesson OPAL's reverb A/B taught.

The finisher now iterates only the variant that exists, so its split, verify and
on-disk census all line up with what was actually rendered.

The finisher decided whether to run the local-vs-global comparison by testing
whether the global drums stem exists. A soundfile writer creates its file the
instant it opens, so that test is true from the first second of an hour-long pass.
This is the same trap that had me reading "4 of 14 sections done" off a directory
count earlier tonight, and it would have been worse here than a wrong progress
number: the comparison seeks into the global stems by ABSOLUTE TIME, so a
truncated global file does not fail, it silently mis-aligns every later track and
returns plausible correlations for the wrong audio.

Now it probes the duration and requires ~3700 of 3779 seconds before attempting
the global half, falling back to the section-only EDA with the shortfall printed.
In practice the unit is ordered After= the demucs producer so the stems should be
complete anyway — but "should be" is exactly the assumption that a demucs failure
mid-global would have quietly violated, and the finisher runs unattended while PLN
sleeps.

Also made the summary report the air-shelf A/B explicitly, since that pair is the
thing he has to judge: both masters listed with size, sample rate, channels and
duration, and a loud MISSING line if either did not render. The EDA settled that
the 8-16 kHz deficit is cymbals rather than codec noise (drums hold 0.367% of
their own energy up there against 0.084% for the runner-up, a 4.4x concentration),
which licenses opening the shelf but says nothing about how far — so the summary
puts the two candidates side by side rather than announcing a winner.

The stem EDA ran on all 14 sections and settled the one parameter that was an
admitted guess. The air shelf sat at +5 dB against a measured 8-16 kHz share of
0.12%, held back because a 320 kbps MP3 puts codec hiss in exactly that band and a
broadband boost cannot tell hiss from hats.

Per stem, mean share of each stem's OWN energy above 8 kHz: drums 0.367%, vocals
0.084%, other 0.033%, bass 0.0%. A 4.4x concentration in drums. Evenly-spread
energy would have meant noise and a shut shelf; concentration means cymbals the
room ate, and opening up is justified by measurement.

HOW FAR is not justified by measurement — that is taste. So --air-gain exists and
the master unit now renders TWO full streaming masters, identical but for the
shelf (+5 and +8), because OPAL already taught us that an effect judged on a clip
is not the same effect judged in place. PLN compares two records tomorrow instead
of ratifying a number I happened to like.

The -9 LUFS "club" target is deliberately dropped, and the reasoning is a
correction to my own earlier conflation of two axes. PLN's "one live club mix"
means the CONTINUOUS set as opposed to the album split — a FORM. Our club variant
is a LOUDNESS. Since no CosmicFest track is cut, the continuous mix simply IS the
master file, so both of his forms were already covered and the -9 render was
optional polish that would have missed anyway (the LRA floor tripped at -10.5 on
the trial). That CPU now buys the A/B, which answers a question he actually has.

Q2, unasked for and worth having: kick presence per track, 40-120 Hz active time
against each track's own p95. Mean 43.4%, against the 59% project_floor_problem
measured for OPAL-26 from real orbit stems. Worst real offenders are #2 There's
Something About Drums at 22.8% and #3 Am i Doing it Right at 33.4%. A stage mic in
a room is a plausible cause on its own, so this is a lead rather than a verdict —
but it is the first time this gig's floor has been measurable at all.

Two things the lens caught that no label would have, both vindicating
feedback_label_and_lens applied to the separator's own names. #14's drums stem is
-84.9 dBFS RMS, essentially empty, which confirms PLN's note that the outro is
"pure dubsiren noise and fun" — so its kick percentage was measuring a noise floor
and reading as a real number. kick_activity is now gated on presence and returns
None with a reason instead, because a percentage of nothing is not a percentage
(presence_is_a_precondition). And #10 PunkAChien's bass stem reads -81.0 dBFS
while its `other` stem is the loudest in the whole table at -26.8: demucs put the
bass INTO other. Anyone reading stem filenames as roles would have concluded
PunkAChien has no bass.

Also fixed the JSON writer, which died on numpy's bool_ after printing every
useful number, and a headline ratio that divided by an epsilon guard when one stem
measured a legitimate 0.000% and announced a 367000x concentration. It now reports
against the runner-up.