What's New

New Feature

ECM-R now reads artist and title metadata from ID3v1, ID3v2, Vorbis Comments, and RIFF INFO tags. The overlay and in-game chyron can therefore show the metadata stored in the audio file instead of relying only on its filename. Missing or malformed fields continue to use the existing filename-derived Artist - Title fallback. Prototype originally proposed by @DeathWrench.

ECM-R now has a GitHub Actions workflow that builds the Release | Win-x86 target and uploads the .asi artifact for every push and pull request. This gives contributors and users a repeatable way to obtain a validated 32-bit build without replacing the established NFSU2 runtime layout.

Playlist entries now prefer embedded artist and title metadata while retaining the filename-derived fallback. This improves display quality for well-tagged libraries without changing how existing filenames are handled.
.mp1 is now explicitly documented as a legacy MPEG-1 Layer I compatibility format. QA guidance prioritizes MP2, MP3, WAV, OGG Vorbis, and AIFF for new music and testing.
OGG documentation now explicitly targets core BASS Ogg Vorbis support, and startup diagnostics include numeric BASS error codes for stream-open and channel-play failures. Ogg Opus and Ogg FLAC remain outside the current runtime unless separate add-ons are supplied.

Failed playback candidates no longer enter shuffle history or trigger unbounded autoplay retries. ECM-R now limits attempts to one playlist pass while preserving normal repeat behavior for successful playback.
Files that BASS cannot open are excluded from runtime playback and the read-only Playlist menu for the current session. The files remain on disk and in [trax], allowing the next launch to probe them again after the user repairs or replaces them.

The ID3v2 parser now prefers BASS_TAG_ID3V2_BINARY with an explicit memory bound and falls back to the legacy BASS_TAG_ID3V2 block on older BASS 2.4 builds. This keeps MP2 and AIFF metadata readable while safely falling back to ID3v1 or filename parsing for malformed tags.
The ID3v1 parser now uses the BASS-compatible TAG_ID3 structure layout instead of raw byte offsets. A compile-time packing assertion verifies that the structure remains the expected 128 bytes.
RIFF INFO parsing now handles the BASS-documented KEY=VALUE\0 representation. Malformed entries are rejected safely instead of producing unreliable metadata.
Vorbis and RIFF metadata walkers now guard pointers before dereferencing and use bounded string handling instead of unbounded strlen or std::string(p) calls. The existing sanity guard remains a heuristic rather than a complete memory bounds check.

Long embedded artist and title values are truncated in a UTF-8-aware way before they reach the chyron. Conversion through wide strings prevents multi-byte characters from being split at the 64-codepoint display limit.

Fixed a pre-existing overlay format-string bug by passing track metadata as data to ImGui::Text. Track titles containing % are now displayed safely instead of being interpreted as formatting directives.

Updated CHANGELOG.md to record the ECM-R changes released in v0.5.14-alpha. The existing ECM-R, ECM, and BttrDrgn attribution lineage remains intact.
Added docs/releases/v0.5.14-alpha.md so the release scope, validation status, and operational caveats are available alongside the changelog. The document keeps the stable ecm-r.x86.asi, ecm-r.x86.ini, and bass.dll deployment contract.

Built successfully in Release | Win-x86 through the repository's GitHub Actions workflow.
Validated frontend/loading/racing/overlay/config for all touched areas.
Confirmed metadata fallback behavior, BASS probe filtering, bounded playback retries, parser guards, UTF-8 truncation, and overlay formatting safety; local Windows runtime smoke testing was unavailable on macOS.

No new known limitations were introduced. OGG support remains limited to core BASS Ogg Vorbis; Ogg Opus and Ogg FLAC require separate add-ons that the current runtime does not load.

Full Changelog: v0.5.13-alpha...v0.5.14-alpha