Castwright v1.8.0

The open-beta release. Castwright reaches more machines this cycle — an early AMD GPU preview and a one-click Pinokio install — on top of a deep round of analysis honesty, multilingual depth, and GPU-contention resilience that keeps long runs upright on an 8 GB card.

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✨ Headline features

🟧 AMD GPU support — early preview (new)

Castwright can reach for an AMD GPU when it finds one, with a safe net under it.

• Auto-detect with CPU fallback — ROCm / DirectML is detected on its own; if the GPU path isn't ready it quietly falls back to the processor so the app still runs (#818).
• Accelerator control — an ACCELERATOR knob + in-app picker, with the resolved per-engine profile surfaced on /health. Kokoro stays on CPU under DirectML (a documented DirectML limitation, not a fault). NVIDIA and Apple Silicon remain the smoothest paths.

📦 One-click install with Pinokio (new)

A self-contained conda install (ops-16) built from the latest published release — no terminal, nothing to install by hand — landing in the same guided first-run as the desktop installers (#821).

🧠 Pick the model that reads your book (new)

The local analyzer is now yours to choose (plan 221).

• Installed-only model picker — pick any Ollama model you've pulled per run; not-yet-pulled curated models install from the Model Manager (#851, #859, #860).
• Honest residency + label — warm/residency and the analysing chip key to the model actually doing the reading, not the configured default; an ANALYZER_KEEP_ALIVE knob; per-phase model support.

🩺 Honest engine health + one-tap Repair

The Model Manager stops showing a hopeful green light (plan 220).

• True per-engine health — package / weights / integrity, with a "Needs repair" badge and a one-click Repair + sidecar restart (#837).
• Re-tiered engines — Qwen → standard (GPU), Coqui → opt-in, Whisper = base; fail-open readiness + diagnostics.

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🌍 Multilingual & attribution (plan 221)

• Cyrillic, end to end — character names, ids and cross-book keys handle non-Latin scripts (#852).
• Steadier non-English attribution — a deterministic narrator-default heuristic, a Russian dash-dialogue preamble guard, and script-aware attribution + ASR normalizers (#852, #824).
• Localized cast review — language-aware minor-cast fold buckets, so a Russian book's grouped roles read in Russian (e.g. Незнакомый Парень / Незнакомая Девушка) instead of English (#856).

📊 Analysing view — honesty & live progress

• Truthful progress — a per-chapter section sub-bar and counts, live ETA refinement, and a model-label chip that mirrors the server-resolved analyzer model (#841, #864, #826).
• Reload-proof — a reconnecting bridge so refreshing the page no longer blanks the elapsed timer (#869).
• Big-chapter handling — Stage-1 chunking for oversized chapters and cast-detection name-fidelity guards (#825, #827).

🎮 GPU residency & resilience (plan 222)

• Waits its turn instead of crashing — withGpuLoad does an atomic evict+verify+load and refuses on a busy card (409) rather than OOM-crashing; a top-bar "GPU busy · N waiting" pill says why (#840, #841).
• Smarter residency — a VRAM-threshold policy keeps the analyzer resident across the analysis loop on a GPU; voice-design and generation preload run through the same gated path.
• VRAM telemetry substrate — passive, env-gated per-engine VRAM sampling (fs-45, record-only; MB-accounting deferred) with a clean-process gate (#861, #863).

🎙️ Voice design & casting

• A/B compare modal fixed — portaled out of the clip-path drawer so it no longer renders clipped; Play-current resolves the Qwen voice and shows the descriptor on Side A; play errors surface (#832, #834).
• Age made audible — Qwen voice-design personas describe age acoustically, not just as a label (#831).

🎧 Listening & companion

• Offline waveform — downloaded chapters persist their peaks, so the phone scrubber stays drawn with no signal.

🏗️ Under the hood

• Kokoro uses the NVIDIA GPU — forces onnxruntime-gpu via an ORT swap (not kokoro-onnx[gpu]); a failed swap is fatal, so it can't silently run on the CPU (#828).
• Analyzer tolerates stray model keys instead of failing the run (#839).
• Test resilience — test:server auto-retries once on a vitest fork-pool worker-crash (#850); the analysis-pipelining rolling-roster CPU-contention timeout flake is quarantined in CI (#875).
• Release hygiene — .gitignore now covers the renamed castwright-workspace/ (#867); a CodeQL workflow and a pre-push commit-subject guard land (#858).
• Docs & Help — CODE_OF_CONDUCT, a repo-opening-public checklist, repo legal pointers, plan-221/222 reconciliations, and new offline Help topics for analysis model-reload / "GPU busy" and an engine that reads "Needs repair".

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Full changelog: v1.7.0...v1.8.0