Release Notes v1.3.1

Released 2026-05-19. View on GitHub.

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The biggest single step since the analysis pipeline was rebuilt in phases. New capabilities across listening, voice, cast and onboarding; dark mode stabilised; the install path is now end-to-end in-app for the alpha audience; restructure + TTS hardened for long structured manuscripts.

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✨ Headline features

🎧 Listening surface overhaul (new)

• Playback speed picker (0.75×–2×) persisted per book, user-placed markers (note / rerecord) with a sidebar, and a sleep timer with countdown presets + end-of-chapter mode (plan 53).
• True RMS waveform peaks computed at encode time and persisted (plan 56); per-book resume bookmarks (plan 47); collapsible editorial Notes card (plan 67).
• Share a 30-second clip of any chapter as MP3 (ffmpeg -ss / -t / -c copy, no re-encode) (plan 69); mint a slugged streaming link for the whole book's M4B (plan 68); M4B + MP3-ZIP download tiles (plan 57).

🛠️ In-app multi-model management (new)

Install Ollama, pull a model, and pre-fetch Coqui XTTS without a terminal (Account → Models card, plan 61).

• Per-platform install state machine (idle → detecting → downloading → installing → installed); model-pull consumes Ollama's NDJSON progress stream; bootstraps are dependency-injectable so tests run offline. New install-coqui.{sh,ps1}.

🔌 Cross-tab state sync (new)

• Open the same book in two tabs and the analysis / generation pills update in lockstep via BroadcastChannel, with two-layer echo suppression and a narrow broadcast scope (only activeStream slots) preserving the single-user contract (plan 63).

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🎙️ Voice & cast

• Per-candidate "Play sample" inside the profile drawer — audition voices against a user-editable sample line, no commit until Save (plan 64).
• Same-book Compare lifted to the global Voices tab; cross-book pairs remain disabled (plan 65).
• Revision history timeline — a read-only chronological log of accept / reject events per chapter via the A/B player modal (plan 55).
• The drift modal's Listen button opens the A/B compare player directly; bulk-apply on confirm-cast ticks both Reuse and Sync in one click.

📖 Ingest & themes

• EPUB series auto-extracted from title parentheticals; MOBI / AZW3 upload covered by real-binary e2e fixtures; cast-view book cards show a title + series metadata strip below the cover.
• Dark mode reached stable after a three-pass contrast bundle — full per-utility override coverage across the white / amber / red / rose ladders + their alpha + hover variants, a bespoke floating-pill-inverse utility, and corrected match-detail drawer z-index (plan 42).

🔊 Generation & restructure fixes

• A structural edit (merge / split / reorder) forced a full re-analysis — Generate halted on "No analysed sentences cached. Re-run analysis first", burning quota and destroying manual cast tweaks. Now the restructure path re-derives the cache from manuscript-edits.json in place and the generation route auto-heals an empty cache. No re-analysis required (plan 70c).
• Long single-speaker chapters froze on the "Worker has gone quiet" banner — the TTS path folded consecutive same-speaker sentences into one giant synth call that ran past the watchdog. Now one call per sentence, so the caption advances continuously and same-speaker prosody drift disappears (plan 70d).
• Bracketed audio tags like [empathic] were spoken aloud literally — no engine in this app interprets bracket markup. Now the closed-vocabulary tag list is stripped at the TTS boundary; arbitrary bracketed prose is preserved (plan 70d).
• Sequential merges on long manuscripts dropped orphaned sentences, surfaced empty 0 sentences · 00:00 rows, and left stale "Chapter N" titles. Now orphans are recovered onto the nearest preceding chapter, empty rows auto-pruned, and generic titles re-derived (plan 70a).
• Several dark-mode surfaces were unreadable — the Halted pill / panel (red-on-red), the Analysing connection pill + profile-drawer engine tabs (near-white on near-white bg-white/{40,60,70,95}), the voice-drift banner, the cast-view selection bar, and the confirm-metadata inputs. All now legible (plan 42).
• The match-detail drawer opened underneath the profile drawer. Now it stacks correctly in both themes.
• A cover-bearing card hid its title + series (gated on the no-cover fallback). Now an always-visible metadata strip below the artwork.
• Editorial notes were dropped on save (missing description on the bookMeta/commitDraft rule). Now both fields round-trip (plan 67).
• The generation pill counters froze when navigating to a different book mid-run, then flipped to "Stalled" on a healthy run. Now they update cross-book.

🏗️ Under the hood

• GitHub Actions runs npm run verify on every PR targeting main, the same gate the pre-push hook runs locally (plan 62).
• Parallel-session worktrees — scripts/wt-new.mjs / wt-list.mjs spawn worktrees with non-colliding dev-server ports (plan 59).
• src/views/listen.tsx decomposed 1136 → 319 lines into three orchestrated sub-components under src/components/listen/, zero spec files modified (plan 60).
• TTS sidecar starts with the server — per-user autoStartSidecar (default on); npm start brings up frontend + server + sidecar in one shot (plan 43).
• Verify-cache --steps=<csv> subset selection; de-flaked e2e suites (flakes-per-run 3–5 → 0).

Full changelog: v1.2.2...v1.3.1