Castwright v1.7.0

The Castwright release. The project grew up this cycle: a new name and identity,
a companion app for your phone and car, guided first-run setup, a one-click sample
book, and first-class support for Apple Silicon Macs — on top of a deep round of
generation-quality and reliability work.

⚠️ Upgrade note: 1.6.0 installs cannot self-upgrade across the rename.
Alpha installs reinstall fresh as Castwright. Your library/data directories move
to the new Castwright paths on first run.

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✨ Headline features

📱 A mobile companion app (new)

Castwright now has a native Flutter companion for Android (and iOS), paired to your
desktop server over your home network — no cloud, no account.

• One-scan pairing — pair by scanning a compact QR code; the channel is
  certificate-pinned and protected by a short-lived pairing code, with per-device
  tokens you can revoke (#562, #565–#567, #679, #696, #591).
• Take your library offline — delta sync downloads books for offline listening,
  with range-resume, atomic swaps, accounting and automatic eviction (#572, #573,
  #606, #614, #616).
• Native player — lock-screen / media-key control, per-book resume, two-way
  resume sync between phone and desktop, per-chapter waveforms (#575, #576, #604, #610).
• Listen in the car — Android Auto / CarPlay in-car browser with a downloaded-only
  2-tab "This Book / Library" layout and current-chapter highlighting (#588, app-9).
• Browse, search & continue — author → series → book hierarchy, a home shelf with
  "Continue listening", and multi-book switching (#577, #582, #615, #618).
• Stream over LAN for instant play without a full download (#589).
• Distribution — signed release APK with an alpha channel, plus a Google Play
  AAB lane (#586, #777); the APK is also offered as a download from the desktop app (#661).

🚀 First-run setup & onboarding (new)

Getting from a fresh clone to a working install is now guided end-to-end.

• First-run setup wizard (fs-21) — a five-step wizard that checks everything
  Castwright needs, installs the default Kokoro voice engine in-app, bootstraps the
  Python sidecar venv, and runs a two-tier smoke test — with plain-language remediation
  when something's missing (#744, #748, #749, #750, #751).
• In-app guided tour (fe-38) — a spotlight walkthrough of the core flow, launchable
  any time from the top-bar ? menu (#765, #772).
• In-app Help / troubleshooting view (fe-29) with a unified, friendly analysis-failure
  taxonomy so errors tell you what to do next (#740, #741).

📖 Try it in one click (new)

A bundled original sample — The Coalfall Commission, a 2-chapter / 14-character
showcase — ships with every voice pre-designed, so you can generate and hear a full-cast
performance before importing anything of your own (#727, #728). You can also replace the
manuscript on an existing book while preserving its designed cast (#724).

🍎 Runs on a Mac

First-class Apple Silicon support — the sidecar auto-detects Metal (mps), with graceful
CUDA → mps → CPU fallback and cross-platform launch scripts. Intel Macs work too (#702, #703).

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🎙️ Voice design & casting

• Design full cast — one click designs a bespoke Qwen voice for every "Needs voice"
  character as a background, reload-resilient job (#637).
• Single voice design is now background-survivable with honest live progress (#639).
• Per-book bulk emotion-variant design with a per-character cast-table glyph strip,
  and emotion variants that travel across linked books in a series (#687).
• Has / Needs emotion-variant filters and per-card "Needs variant" badges (#642, #643).
• Per-quote emotion loop completed — detect-emotions + UX (fs-33/fs-34) (#596).
• Cross-book voice reuse hardened — match by stable voice id when names drift, scope
  generic role-names (e.g. "Narrator") to the same series, and stop cross-series mismatches
  on the confirm screen (#634, #681, #689, #693, #694).

🔊 Generation quality & reliability

• Per-sentence QA gate — every line is acoustically checked and (with srv-31)
  transcript-verified via Whisper ASR before a chapter is assembled, with automatic
  re-record of the broken ones (#513, #526, #531, #646).
• Generation stall protection — long runs ride out sidecar recycles and recover on
  their own (defense-in-depth, three waves) (#673, #677).
• Voice-design VRAM contention robustness — engine mutual-exclusion, liveness timeouts,
  honest progress (#685).
• Attribution coverage guards for large chapters — re-split under-budget stage-2
  chapters, recover dropped speakers, preserve tagged speakers (#516, #520, #532, #609, #678).
• Golden-audio regression harness (ops-11) — opt-in acoustic regression gate (#527).

🎧 Listening experience (web)

• Continue-listening rail + reading-stats dashboard (fs-15 / fs-16) — your shelf
  remembers what you were mid-way through; #/stats shows streaks and hours, fed by a
  wall-clock accumulator and offline buffering (#783, #792).
• Listen download section finalized with truthful, store-level export progress (#675).
• Real per-chapter waveform bars in the Listen view (fe-33) (#585).

⚙️ Models, settings & covers

• In-app Model Manager (fs-23) — load/unload engines and per-model Ollama residency
  from the app (#581, #766).
• In-app Advanced Settings — ~70 model/generation/QA knobs with an env-precedence
  resolver and drift-guarded .env.example (#669).
• Multi-source cover search — OpenLibrary + Apple + Google, with free-text matching
  and per-source badges (#697).
• Device ground-truth on /health plus a diagnostics panel (side-14) (#718).

🔌 Sync & server infrastructure

• LAN security — opt-in shared-secret token guard and per-device tokens with revoke
  (srv-20 / srv-33) (#561, #564, #591).
• Sync primitives — stable per-chapter UUIDs, a delta-friendly per-chapter sync
  manifest with durations, and guarded listen-progress writes (srv-32/34/35) (#558, #569, #570, #601).
• Merge journal for deterministic alias un-linking (srv-1) (#793).

🏗️ Under the hood

• Castwright rebrand end-to-end — package names, release artifact
  (castwright-vX.Y.Z.zip), data dirs, startup banner, in-app /about page, branded
  narrator-credit default, and self-hosted General Sans + Lora fonts (no runtime
  font CDN) (#623, #629, #653, #657, #660, #698, #713).
• Public-readiness docs + licensing (FSL-1.1-ALv2) (#663, #664).
• Dependency majors round 3 (#712).

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Full changelog: v1.6.0...v1.7.0