Release Notes v1.4.0

Released 2026-05-22. View on GitHub.

---

Castwright 1.4.0

The largest round since the v1.3.1 listening overhaul. The app now drives on phone + tablet over LAN HTTPS, chapter audio is loudness-normalised against EBU R128 with a per-chapter drift report card, AAC/M4A and Opus join MP3 as first-class codecs, the analyzer pipelines a two-model split that nearly doubles quota, and generation parallelises across chapters.

---

✨ Headline features

📱 Mobile + tablet over LAN HTTPS (new)

A six-wave round bringing the app to phone + tablet (plan 81).

• One-command LAN bootstrap — mkcert drops a local root CA on every dev box; npm run install:cert-mobile prints LAN URL + QR + per-OS steps; dev:lan / start:lan serve HMR Vite + Node at https://0.0.0.0:5173 / :8443.
• Three viewport tiers — <640px phone (single-column, drawers + bottom sheets, full-screen modals), 640–1024px tablet (two-column, dialog modals, right drawer), ≥1024px desktop (three-pane). Every view re-laid out.
• Touch-equivalence rule — every desktop drag / hover affordance ships a tap replacement (tap-to-assign voice pills, PointerEvent manuscript boundaries covering mouse + touch + pen); hover labels stay faintly visible via a new coarse-pointer: Tailwind variant; controls ≥ 44×44 px per WCAG 2.5.5.

🔊 EBU R128 loudness + new codecs (new)

• Two-pass loudnorm targeting -16 LUFS / 11 LU / -1.5 dBTP on every newly-rendered chapter (AUDIO_LOUDNORM_ENABLED), surfaced as a colour-coded per-row drift pill + an expandable report card with sparkline (plans 71, 77).
• AAC/M4A + Opus join MP3 as first-class chapter codecs via BookStateJson.audioFormat, with matching export shapes (plan 72).

🩺 Pipelined two-model analyzer (new)

• Phase 0 (cast detection, gemma-4-31b-it) and Phase 1 (attribution, gemini-3.1-flash-lite) run in parallel with a configurable min-lag; the two phases hit independent rate-limit buckets, so effective quota nearly doubles. Legacy single-model path preserved verbatim when unset (plan 88).

---

📖 Library & manuscript

• Library search + table view — debounced title / author search, a tag-chip filter row (tags persist on BookStateJson.tags), and a card↔table view toggle with a series-grouped dense table (plans 73, 76).
• Portable book bundle — GET /export/portable streams a single .zip (state + manuscript + audio + cover + change-log + MANIFEST); POST /import/portable accepts it with rename / replace / skip conflict modes (plan 75).
• Manuscript re-upload diff — a side-by-side sentence-level diff gates re-upload before any state mutation, warning when chapter title overrides won't match the new content (plans 74, 84).
• Per-chapter rename — a pencil affordance on every chapter row, persisted with a sticky titleOverridden flag that survives heuristic refresh-titles passes (plan 78).
• Low-confidence triage polish — J / K jump to next / previous misattribution and auto-open the inspector; a typeahead picker materialises a missing series-mate from the prior roster via POST /cast/add-from-roster (plan 90).

🩺 Cast drift & multi-book

• Drift modal collapses ~300 events into ~6–18 cards — one card per (book × character × snapshot) instead of one per event (~7,200 DOM nodes → ~200), with bulk Regen-all / Dismiss-all / Auto-regen-all (plan 91).
• Background drift polling — a bulk GET /api/revisions?bookIds=... + a two-tier poller (30s active, 120s background) surfaces Book B's drift in Book A's modal within ~2 min, active-book latency unchanged (plan 83).

🔊 Generation

• Bounded worker pool over chapters via GEN_CHAPTER_CONCURRENCY (default 2), with per-chapter SSE tracks kept isolated (plan 87).
• Export queue Retry + Download wired — failed rows re-fire the original POST; done rows without a signed URL stream directly (plan 82).
• Kokoro stop pill in the top bar frees ~1 GB VRAM for an XTTS warm or a heavier analyzer model without restarting the sidecar.

🎧 Generation fixes

• Edited speaker reassignments / split sentences were silently dropped on regenerate — the analyser cache wasn't rebuilt after a manuscript edit. Now regenerate applies the manuscript-edits overlay before synth (plan 80).
• Chapters had no audible boundary and titles weren't spoken — players cross-faded straight from one into the next. Now each chapter opens with its title voiced in the narrator voice + a baked-in inter-chapter silence (plan 101).
• Force-regen on a range re-ran the catch-up replay against the just-chosen chapters, racing the new run. Now the replay skips in-scope chapters so the user-selected scope wins.
• The generation pill froze at its last snapshot and never drained after completion. Now it drains to zero across excluded + idle gaps.
• Two tabs on one workspace fanned out idle cross-tab updates. Now the broadcast layer diffs snapshots before posting and debounces phase progress.

🏗️ Under the hood

• Frontend perf pass — broadcast-middleware shallow-diffs activeStream, shallow-equality selector wraps, and route-level React.lazy drop the main bundle 410 → 345 kB (gzip 108 → 91 kB) (plan 89); manuscript / confirm-cast / listen lists virtualise via @tanstack/react-virtual above their cutoffs (plans 92, 93).
• Exports moved out of the hidden jail to <bookDir>/exports/<slug>.<ext>, with a sync-folder "Test" probe and widened rename retries for Drive / OneDrive (plan 79).
• CI Node 20 → 22 → 24; scripts/wt-merge.mjs reconciliation helper (plan 85); dev-only worktree dashboard at #/worktrees (plan 86); ~14 new e2e specs + the responsive harness; LAN-cert bootstrap scripts + Playwright mobile / tablet projects.

Full changelog: v1.3.1...v1.4.0